Bug#790955: 790955 - localectl list-keymaps

[Andreas Henriksson]

Hi Michael,

I'll do my best to fill in details that is how I've understood them
(both on fedora and debian side). No promises I've got it right.
I however think your description below isn't correct.

On Sat, Nov 17, 2018 at 08:32:40PM +0100, Michael Biebl wrote:
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2015 08:25:37 -0400 Tom H <tomh0665 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Fedora (and other distributions as well as systemd upstream) uses
> > "/usr/lib/systemd/systemd-vconsole-setup" and "/etc/vconsole.conf"
> > whereas Debian uses its home-grown solution with systemd and sysvinit.
> > 
> > So "localectl list-keymaps" cannot work. It could be patched to output
> > an error; but is this work really worth it?
> 
> The main issue afaics is that Fedora uses the keymap files from kbd [1].

AIUI Fedora uses the 'ckbcomp' part of console-setup to build static
keymaps at build-time. Or atleast that's the impression I got from
reading I think it was this:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=837292

On the debian side, console-setup will compile the keymap if needed
at runtime/bootup. See init scripts in console-setup and trace
down what things like /bin/setupcon does. You also want to pay
attention to /etc/console-setup/cached*gz files. If these are missing
your next bootup will spawn ckbcomp. (And If your filesystem is
read-only you'll get that on every boot.)

(I agree with the comments on the rh bugzilla above and would personally
prefer the fedora solution, but when this has been discussed in the
past objections where that we can't possibly generate all possible
combinations of all keymaps, modifiers, etc. I'm skeptical about letting
99.9% users pay the penalty to cater to the 0.1% if even that many.)

> We do have a kbd package in debian, but it only provides binaries but
> not the keymap data files.

I don't think anyone (except maybe slackware) uses the data files from
kbd.

> 
> The keymap files that are installed on a Debian system seem to come from
> console-data.
> console-data seems to be based off ftp://lct.sourceforge.net/pub/lct/
> but is nowadays more or less a Debian-only solution.

I don't think console-data is relevant for most installs. As mentioned
console-setup will generate the keymap if needed on the fly on
regular debian installs. Keep in mind that there's lots of legacy stuff
in debian, because at some point people wanted to make it possible for
multiple different competing solutions. At the time it seems people
where very eager about console-tools - which ultimately faded away and
aren't part of debian anymore.

> 
> One obvious difference between the  keymap files shipped by kbd and
> console-data is, that kbd uses a map.gz file extension whereas
> console-data uses kmap.gz.
> 
> 
> 
> Alastair, Andreas: I'd like to know more about why Debian uses the
> keymap files from console-data and not the one provided by kbd.

As already mentioned, I don't think this statement is true.

> 
> If you can shed some light on this, this would be most welcome.

HTH.

Regards,
Andreas Henriksson