Bug#815154: gnome-control-center removes XKBMODEL and XKBOPTIONS from /etc/default/keyboard

[Anton Zinoviev]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 11:51:35AM -0300, Felipe Sateler wrote:
> On 19 February 2016 at 14:52, Anton Zinoviev <anton at lml.bas.bg> wrote:
> >
> > XKBMODEL has no default value (at least in console-setup).  It should always be
> > present and never as empty value.

Thanks to this discussion, now I think it will be a good idea for console-setup 
to compute some default XKBMODEL.
 
> This is not what keyboard(5) says:
> 
> 
> XKBMODEL
>      Specifies the XKB keyboard model name.  Default: pc105 for  most
>      platforms.

Thank you.  I acknowledge that this is a bug in the documentation.  I will have 
to rewrite this man-page so that it becomes clearer which parts in it are 
software independent and which are related specificly to console-setup.
 
> On 20 February 2016 at 11:02, Anton Zinoviev <anton at lml.bas.bg> wrote:
> > In case it is difficult to preserve the existing value, you can use 'pc105' as a
> > default value.  Alternatively, the following table with default values can be
> > used:
> >
> > Architecture  Subarchitecture Model
> > -----------------------------------
> > m68k          atari           ataritt
> > m68k          mac             macintosh_old
> > m68k          Other           pc105
> > powerpc       amiga           amiga
> > powerpc       Other           pc105
> > Other                         pc105
> 
> Maybe console-setup should encode this table itself, so that the
> documentation becomes correct.

In fact, console-setup can compute default XKBMODEL if one is missing.  If the 
file /etc/default/keyboard becomes corrupt, then this will be corrected when the 
package is upgraded (or the user uses dpkg-reconfigure).

The reason no such logic exists in /bin/setupcon (the script used to actually 
configure the console) is that the script setupcon can be used on any Linux or 
FreeBSD variety (not just Debian) and I don't know how to implement a table like 
this in a distribution independent way.  Therefore, all such logic is encoded in 
the package scripts (mostly debconf config and postinst).  Even if I include such 
a logic in setupcon, it will be somewhat primitive, so a warning to the user will 
have to be issued when XKBMODEL is missing.

Anton Zinoviev