[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#442316: Xorg hotplugging problems [WAS: Re: Bug#442316: xserver-xorg-input-evdev: evdev from experimental messes up my keyboard layout]

[David Nusinow]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 10:02:35PM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 08:02:31PM +0200, ext Michael Biebl wrote:
> > Whenever xorg input hotplugging kicks in, the evdev driver is used. The
> > kbd keyboard settings from xorg.conf are ignored and the en_US keyboard
> > layout is used.
> 
> Yes, this should probably be fixed up, I guess.  But the long-term fix
> is to provide an FDI file in /etc that specifies the keyboard layout.

My feeling is the other way around, provided that the X server is the only
user of this field. People already know how to edit xorg.conf, and they
expect it. Telling them to edit a relatively obscure file among many other
fdi's is more painful. There's also userspace tools that exist to help with
generating a xorg.conf, but nothing friendly to deal with fdi's.

> > If I understood Daniel correctly, he proposes to set the keyboard layout
> > (probably based on the values from xorg.conf) via a generated fdi file.
> > I'd like to avoid that, because that would complicate things.
> 
> How would it complicate anything?  xorg.conf is a file, so is an FDI.
> We're already using FDIs through HAL, anyway ...

Generating xorg.conf sucks though and we're trying to get away from that as
much as is sensible. Of course, this was the one section I'd planned to
keep generating anyway.

> > Preferably, the X server should use the keyboard layout specified in
> > xorg.conf (for the old kbd driver) even when used in xorg hotplugging mode.
> 
> Yes, probably.

My sense is that if we're going to do this, then there's no need to
generate the fdi. Just generate the xorg.conf. We can patch the server to
use libhal_device_set_property_string to dynamically set the keyboard
layout at runtime in hal's database, and the server can just draw that
information from xorg.conf initially.

 - David Nusinow