[Pkg-kbd-devel] Re: pkg-kbd project on Alioth to maintain kdb Debian package

[Denis Barbier]

Only sent to pkg-kbd-devel, I guess that interested people have
subscribed.  Thanks to Konstantinos for having forwarded my
initial message.

On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 01:11:25AM +0300, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> I am very glad for the initiative to create the pkg-kbd project.  So
> far I have informed only Alastair about my work for the console data,
> now we have a public mailing list so more people can be involved.
> Unfortunately I was more busy that I supposed to be and fortunately
> the work I wanted to do is already almost complete. :-)
> 
> Last year I promised Alastair to create a new, consistent collection
> of console fonts.  This task is done.  But when I looked more closely
> at the console-data package in order to see how to integrate the new
> collection I was scared - this simple in nature package turned out to
> be so complex! :-O

Yes, you are not alone in this case ;)

> Alastair had told me that he intends to create a system that allows
> the X keyboard definitions to be used on the console.  This task is
> quiet difficult but necessary in order to simplify the console-data
> package.  So I decided to try to create a quick and durty "X to
> console" translator that could also serve as proof of the concept and
> helped Alastair to implement easier his system.  This task is also
> already done and tested for the "AT" keyboards.  It works better than
> I had initially supposed it to work; it will allow us to configure the
> keyboard together for X and for the console.

I told Konstantinos at debconf5 that this is not possible, and I am
glad to learn that you did it ;)

> Due to lack of enough time I was unable to implement the Debian part
> of all this, i.e. to do any Debian packaging.  I think it will be
> easier to create a completely new package that is not based on the
> current console-data.  I have no idea about what should be its name.
> I have some uncertainty about how to package the keyboard part.
> 
> I will give more info in another message.  There is ready to commit
> code, probably we do not need another project on Alioth and I can
> commit in the SVN of pkg-kbd?

Sure, please do.  You have been added to the list of committers, but
please import your current files into some 'trash' directory, say
people/zinoviev for instance.  We will move it to a better location
when we know what to do with it.

[...]
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 03:21:43AM +0300, Konstantinos Margaritis wrote:
> > * A universal way to setup console fonts and keymaps, regardless of 
> > the actual locale.

Keymaps only depend on encodings, and as you suggested below to only
support UTF-8, keymaps do not depend on the current locale.
I know almost nothing about fonts, so I cannot tell about that.

> > Assuming that UTF-8 is used universally, this should make things 
> > easier for us actually and spare us the effort of having to handle 
> > different encodings. In my opinion, I don't think we should even 
> > bother to support older encodings for the console. Just go UTF-8 all 
> > the way.
> 
> The kernel does not support fully UTF-8 on the console.  So far many
> patches have been submitted and rejected by the kernel developers. :-)
> Acording to them the kernel should stay as simple as possible, the
> text mode Linux console should be used only in emergency cases (aka
> single user mode) and in most cases people should use programs such as
> jfbterm (even for the Latin1 languages).

I had a quick look at packages with an interface::framebuffer tag
(namely jfbterm, zhcon and fbiterm), and according to the BTS, their
maintainers seem to be quite unresponsive, which is pretty annoying.
Does anyone have some experience with these tools? 

> Currently the CapsLock key does not work properly in UTF-8 mode.

IIRC it works only for latin characters.

> The Compose key also does not work.

Right.

Denis