Re: About console-setup in d-i
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 07:33:39PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Friday 27 April 2007 15:04, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> > > Can you give some idea of what would be needed? Some questions I
> > > have:
> > > - would we still need kbd-chooser, or is there a replacement
> >
> > We need it only during the first stage; the udebs replace it.
>
> Sorry, but I don't understand this [1] at all.
> [1] Talking about "first stage" does not really make any sense anymore.
> The whole installation now takes place before the reboot: there is no
> longer a "second stage" with base-config. It _does_ make sense to
> distinguish between things that happen in the D-I environment and in
> the /target chroot.
Ahh, I didn't have in mind the first and the second stage of the
installer... What I had in mind is that we can move to console-setup
in two steps [*]. During the first step console-setup is used in
/target for some languages and during the second step it is used
everywhere for everything.
> You seem to be saying that we will still need kbd-chooser in D-I and
> at the same time that the console-setup udebs replace it...
My plan for the first step of the transition was that both kbd-chooser
and console-setup are used. This step is very simple. During this
step, console-setup is used for some of the languages in /target, but
the installer still uses kbd-chooser. The aim of this is to provide
console support for some languages that are currently unsupported and
to improve the support of others.
This step doesn't make the installer more complex. The installer
already has support for console-cyrillic, the only difference now is
console-setup is used instead of console-cyrillic and that
console-setup is used for more languages than just a few. Both
packages provide similar functionality, however console-cyrillic is
limited only to some Cyrillic languages while console-setup is much
more universal and works for currently unsupported languages such as
Armenian, Esperanto, Thai, Georgian and Vietnamese.
> Could you explain again what will be used to select a keymap in the
> installer when we switch to console-setup? Does console-setup provide
> something that replaces kbd-chooser?
The udebs (currently disabled) of console-setup replace kbd-chooser.
I can reenable them and upload as soon as you tell me. These udebs
are not required for what I am calling here 'first step'.
> I don't think we should make any changes before this is clear. If we make
> a switch to console-setup, we should IMO make it for both the installer
> itself and for the installed system, and also for all languages.
> Using both will only create a maintenance and troubleshooting nightmare.
Using both won't create more nightmares about the console support in
d-i because the console support d-i is already complex enough in order
to cope with console-setup with no problems (there is already support
for console-cyrillic). :-)
But you are right that if console-setup is used both for the installer
and for the installed system and also for all languages, this will
simplify the maintenance and the troubleshooting greatly.
Anton Zinoviev
[*] A third step is also possible - use console-setup in order to
provide internationalised low memory installs. The keymaps of
console-keymaps-at are 284KB while the keymaps of
console-setup-pc-ekmap are compressed in only 84KB. Add to this
one big console font (4KB) and a setfont binary (unknown size) and
we have a working Unicode support without framebuffer. I am
not sure if the development efforts to implement this are worty.
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