[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 Wed, Oct 24, 2007 at 01:53:40PM +0300, Daniel Stone wrote:
> 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 ...

Ok, I missed that somehow. So it should probably be hal that generates this
and not the xserver?

> > > > 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.

Yeah, I'm mainly concerned with not breaking existing setups. I feel like
we've been doing that a lot lately. Luckly, lenny is a ways away so we have
time to break things quite a bit before we get it right.

 - David Nusinow