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

[Daniel Stone]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2007 at 08:17:10PM -0400, ext David Nusinow wrote:
> 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.

As I've said before, the X server isn't the only user of the field. :)
Ubuntu were trying to move to cxkb a year or so ago, and the only thing
that stopped them in the end was how huge the XKB codebase was, which
I'm fixing (very slowly) upstream.  So yeah, if having this in HAL lets
us finaly unify console and X keymaps ...

> > > 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.

Well, you could even have a postinst that scans xorg.conf and generates
the FDI, but yes, the X server should be responsible for checking this
and not breaking existing setups.

Cheers,
Daniel
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