speakup and debian-installer

["Alastair McKinstry" <mckinstry@computer.org>]

Hi,

I'm the kbd-chooser maintainer for the new Debian Installer.
I'm working on bug #239385, which appears to have problems
with kbd-chooser and console-tools due to speakup not
being installed; from looking at the code it appears that
for the speakup keymaps to work, you need a speakup-patched
kernel; is this the case?

In which case, why are the speakup patches not in the
mainline Debian kernels (just a question;  don't want to provoke
a flamewar). 
d-i uses a default kernel for each architecture; it may then
install onto the system an optimised kernel for that particular
machine. So, it appears:

(1) For speakup to work in the installer, we need to use a kerne-image-*-speakup
image. (Other than the speakup patches, how does this differ from the normal
i386 images?)

(2) If the kernel is not speakup-patched, how do we detect this in kbd-chooser
(the system map will not be shipped in d-i)?
Does it make more sense just to not offer speakup in
kbd-chooser, or ship a speakup-variant of d-i with
speakup kernel and keymap? 

Regards,
Alastair McKinstry