Bug#790955: 790955 - localectl list-keymaps

[Alastair McKinstry]

On 17/11/2018 19:32, 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].
> We do have a kbd package in debian, but it only provides binaries but
> not the keymap data files.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> If you can shed some light on this, this would be most welcome.
>
> Regards,
> Michael
>
Sorry for the delay; some history:

I took over maintainership of console-tools / console-data / 
console-common from Yann Dirson / Martin Michlmayr in 2002.

They were a fork of the (then) moribund kbd package : they added some 
extra functionality and console fonts / keymaps for other architectures 
and locales.

Yann was the upstream author of console-* .  console-common was a 
wrapper package that allowed the user to use either 'kbd' or 
'console-tools' and still use the extra files.

My work was primarily bugfixing and adding udeb support for the Debian 
Installer, which was my primary Debian work at that time.

console-* themselves fell moribund, and later 'kbd' was revived. I spent 
some time merging the console-* packages back into kbd, and kbd took 
back over as the primary,

along with the "new" console-setup.

I still in principle maintain console-data and console-common, mostly 
fixing egregious bugs, but they are deprecated in favour of kbd / 
console-setup. (There are still some data files present that are not, I 
believe, present in kbd, but do not have the time /hardware to confirm.

Ideally, console-data and console-common would be obsoleted and removed 
from Debian.

Regards

Alastair



> [1] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/legion/kbd.git
> [2] https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/console-data

-- 
Alastair McKinstry, <alastair at sceal.ie>, <mckinstry at debian.org>, https://diaspora.sceal.ie/u/amckinstry
Misentropy: doubting that the Universe is becoming more disordered.