Getting rid of kbd-chooser, console-tools and console-data is one of the D-I release goals for Squeeze. This page is meant to track down the status of this work.
Resources:
* Summary mail by Anton Zinoviev
Steps:
* Step 1 (use c-s without udebs):
Goal: use console-setup for even more languages (such as Vietnamese and all non-Latin languages) the same way currently the Cyrillic languages use console-cyrillic - have localechooser use console-setup instead of kbd for some languages (Experimental image as of Aug. 10th 2007). Trying this spotted bug 437142 in perl-base. perl-base needs to be fixed or console-setup modified to not use the offending perl module (DONE in perl 5.8.8-8)
- make the Cyrillic languages use console-setup instead of console-cyrillic (needs changes in localechooser and tasksel's "cyrillic" task). done in localechooser.
- have localechooser use c-s for all languages done
- do not install console-data by default done
* Step 2 (full deployment of the c-s udebs):
- have localechooser set debian-installer/locale-encoding (DONE in 1.41)
- have a kbd udeb with loadkeys and kbd_mode (DONE in kbd 1.12-18)
- Include kbd-udeb to the initrd images. ChristianPerrier: is that needed? It apparently works well without it. SamuelThibault: note that console-setup-udeb does depend on it. It seems to be working as it is now.
- (to be detailed) get rid of console-data (From Anton: "The most difficult part inside console-setup is to make the model/layout strings translatable. The X upstream provides translations in a xml file but I have no idea how to use them. ST: translations are not in the xml file, they are in .po/.mo files, code to extract it commited and appeared in 1.35). done and tested in 1.36
- parse base.xml to generate locale/country -> layout/variant default choice (ask ST, some bugs are being fixed in xkeyboard-config, some fixed by the 1.5-1 upload, and 513426, fixed upstream). RFC on patch. Now done by hand.
somehow generate the non-latin list from xkb-data (SamuelThibault)
- in the -udeb case, move translations to a separate file in order to be able to remove it when in lowmem mode. We can not do this in the deb case as at config time you can not expect any file to be unpacked already, even from predepends, but in the udeb case we know c-s' are (SamuelThibault). ST: Translations are in debconf templates now.
- check the console-setup functionality against the existing functionality in kbd-chooser done.
check serial console installs, UML, and headless systems. TODO 658046
- parse base.xml to get e.g; compose:caps) default_compose='Caps Lock';; (ask SamuelThibault) (translations are also available in the po/ directory of xkeyboard-config)
- (optional?) use the Ubuntu way to set the keymap?
- integrate console-setup in D-I l10n framework. That needs to spread its debconf templates among sublevels depending on the priority of questions (DONE)
- find a way to have Debian translators contribute to xkeyboard-config translations. These are managed upstream (freedesktop.org) and they use http://www.translationproject.org the Translation Project. We will need to redirect our translators to the TP and discourage them to send translations in Debian. (DONE)
Problems to solve/unknown issues:
All architectures support, in principle it is already handled by the config script and we just need to include the correct ekmap packages. According to config.proto, alpha/amd64/arm/i386/ia64/mips/s390 use pc-ekmap, m68k uses amiga, atari, macintoshold, sun4, sun5 and pc -ekmap, powerpc uses amiga, macintoshold and pc -ekmap, sparc uses sun4, sun5 and pc -ekmap, others use pc-ekmap. What about hppa? kbd-chooser says pc105 but also mentions hil, suggested to add hp-ekmap in 531482 (SamuelThibault)
- Confirm that c-s solves the "keyboard architecture" problem (e.g. that usb-mac keymaps are really only for Macintosh keyboards, while most USB keyboards have plain AT-keyboard keymaps)
- Check preseeding support: preseeding the parameter works, but fully-automatic configuration needs to be fixed, 659918 .
Check size reduction in lowmem mode (not only translations (done in debconf), but also data). TODO: lowmem hacks updated, check it.
Known issues reported by testers:
- No way to come back in console-setup when it has been executed once. Was already the case with kbd-chooser.