"Alastair McKinstry" <mckinstry@computer.org> writes:
> 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?
Yes, and no. As far as I can see, speakup only required a special console
keymap up until recently. The patch and kernel-image packages of
speakup currently in sid/sarge do no longer require a special speakup keymap.
Actually, to tell the truth, I have no idea why the keymap is in there
at all.
> In which case, why are the speakup patches not in the
> mainline Debian kernels
Well, I'd certainly like that, but it is a quite intrusive patch, which
is probably not really suitable for default inclusion.
> 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?)
The current state of things is that we have *one* generic
kernel-image-VERSION-speakup package. Building packages for all arch flavours
is way too much overkill right now. A user who uses the access flavour should
ideally have a choice of which kernel she wants to install in the target
system. Speakup users would choose the speakup variant to not loose speech
after reboot, and people who do not require speakup (but use a braille
display for instance) would be free to install an optimized kernel
if they want.
> (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?
Well, we have a speakup variant of d-i already (the access floppy).
And I'd say kbd-chooser doesn't need to ship a speakup keymap at all.
At least not since speakup does its review mappings internally now.
--
CYa,
Mario | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
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