Bug#524235: Default alt-gr key replacement should be right alt for usa keyboard.

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

On Friday 15 May 2009, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 10:26:14PM +0300, Anton Zinoviev wrote:
> > On Mon, May 04, 2009 at 08:12:08PM +0200, Kurt Roeckx wrote:
> > > And it shouldn't make both keys work the same.  They never have
> > > worked the same for me.  One is a Left Alt, the other a Right Alt.
> > >
> > > > > It seems I need to select the "Right Alt" option to make my
> > > > > keyboard work like it used to again.  I didn't have any kind
> > > > > of configuration before.
> >
> > Now I see -- most traditional keyboard layouts are defining the right
> > Alt as AltGr (including the default one).  In the past console-setup
> > did the same but there were some complaints from American users who
> > did not like this behaviour.
>
> I see no good reason for that.

Note that the US keyboard layout is fairly common in a lot of other 
countries than the US itself. It is for example THE most common keyboard 
layout in the Netherlands and Dutch users very much _do_ expect to have 
an alt-gr key by default as it is essential to type accented letters.

One option might be to define a "US international" variant that does have 
the alt-gr. When converting from console-data that might mean _always_ 
asking whether the user wants one or the other if the current setting is 
US.

Cheers,
FJP

P.S. Currently I myself don't bother too much about proper kbd config for 
console and X.Org as I have the correct layout selected [1] in KDE and 
almost exclusively work in that. But for a lot of users it is important.

[1] Even there I use US basic, but with some Xkb options to enable alt-gr, 
a 3rd level key and €.