[Pkg-kbd-devel] Why console-setup is not migrating to testing

[Anton Zinoviev]

On Wed, Oct 18, 2006 at 03:47:55PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> 
> I can remember no discussion on either debian-boot or debian-devel about 
> the actual implementation of console-setup in the installer, or even 
> about a migration to console-setup for installed systems.

You are right -- there was no discussion on debian-boot or debian-devel.  

This is because I feel more comfortably when other people are pushing
console-setup towards more wide use.  Here I must thank Colin Watson and
Tollef Fog Heen who worked on console-setup and AFAIK now Ubuntu uses 
console-setup by default.  Tollef submitted some patches for the udebs 
but I don't know whether these udebs are used by Ubuntu.

For installed systems the migration to console-setup is extremely easy 
(console-setup doesn't conflict with any other package in etch):

apt-get install console-setup
dpkg-reconfigure console-setup

The second of these commands is there because console-setup asks most
questions with medium or low priority.

> So, if you'd like to see console-setup in Etch, I would suggest the 
> correct steps are:
> - convince the project and RMs that having it in Etch would be a good
>   idea;

Version 1.6 is already in etch.

> - disable the building of udebs and upload a new version without udebs.

Done. Now lets hope there is enough time for the new version to migrate
to testing.

> Of course, I would be happy to see a mail on the debian-boot list 
> explaining how we could switch to console-setup post-Etch and work with 
> you to implement that. That's also why I suggest to disable the building 
> of the udebs and not to remove it completely.

One thing that must have happened a long ago (but didn't because of my
lasyness) is to use console-setup for languages that currently are not
supported on the console at all (such as Vietnamese, Georgian, Armenian,
Lao, Thai).  This can be implemented the same way the Cyrillic languages
currently use the (now obsoleted) package console-cyrillic.

This is the easy part for more general switch to console-setup in d-i:

  1. localechooser should provide information about the encoding of the 
     chosen locale.  Otherwise the console-setup-udeb has to ask one
     unnecessary question;

  2. package "loadkeys" in some udeb;

  3. include the udebs of console-setup in the prebuild images of d-i;

  4. remove all console-related stuff from localechooser -- 
     console-setup doesn't have to be provided with any configuration 
     information.

This is the more difficult part:

  1. Currently xkeyboard-config doesn't provide working configiration 
     mechanism for non-at keyboards.  Work with upstream to fix this.  
     (The problem is that these keyboards are used on architectures 
     where X is not very popular.)

  2. Find out how to translate the lists of the available keyboards.  
     The first problem is that the upstream provides translations in 
     XML-file and I don't know how to extract them from there.  The 
     second problem is that console-setup has to generate the lists of 
     the keyboard models/layouts/variants in runtime.

Anton Zinoviev