Quoting Frans Pop (elendil@planet.nl): > On Tuesday 02 June 2009, Christian Perrier wrote: > > One of the release goals of Debian Installer for squeeze is dropping > > the use of console-data keyboard mappings, to replace them by > > console-setup [1]. > > Here are (finally) the results of my tests. Sorry for the delay; I will During two long train trips, I carefully read Frans mail as well as the followups made by others. In the following, I tried to reformulate the main criticisms in a few categories. The point is checking whether we share our understanding of the problems...and throw out a few vague ideas about possible ways to address these concerns. Size impact ----------- General concern. Possible solutions: - solve other issues...particularly the one about too many choices and the one about useless questions. Special handling of translations -------------------------------- Translations of keyboard layout, model, variant are handled in /usr/share/c-s-mini/c-s.config. That brings a significant impact over handling them in debconf as it doesn't allow dropping translations to save memory as it's donne in low memory situations. My understanding of the rationale for this: terms for these choices come from xkeyboard-config and are translated there. So, the first proposed implementation has been to take the strings and translations from there and inject them in the config script. Possible solutions: - build the templates files in a similar way to localechooser and iso-codes, taking translations from xkeyboard-config .mo files - ? Offering keymaps for all architectures -------------------------------------- In expert mode, keymap models for all arches are proposed. Possble solutions: - clean this out? :-) Too many choices ---------------- The c-s udeb proposes everything proposed by xkeyboard-config. That makes way too many possible combinations, therefore confusing choices and a size impact (because of i18n). Possible solutions: - instead of a "everything possible in xkb-data", simplify the choices list by reducing to "one keymap, eventually two, for each supported language" Wording problems for some choices --------------------------------- "USA" vs "American English"... We actually *already* had this debate about console-data and the clear conclusion was that using country names is very often wrong: keymaps are most often designed by the language they're designed for, first, then *eventually* differenciated by country names. Possible solutions: - change names..:-)...which actually means moving away from xkeyboard-config names and use our own naming scheme, eventually re-using names from console-data, that have proven being accepted for years. Useless questions ----------------- Some questions were not formerly asked and seem generally useless *even in expert mode*. Questioned templates: altgr, compose, encoding, charset, console font, font size, virtual consoles Possible solutions: - discuss about them and drop the useless questions (at least in D-I). Yes, that may mean not having the same codebase in D-I and outside D-I but we could also wonder whether those questions are relevant for standard installation of the package, anyway. Preseeding broken ----------------- That issue seems related to "not able to configure the keyboard twice". Possible solutions: - fix the "configure twice" problem - really test preseeding Allow skipping keyboard configuration ------------------------------------- There's a regression here. Possible solutions: - add a medium priority question allowing to *not* configure the keyboard just like kbd-chooser is doing. One really needs to first check how that's done in kbd-chooser (which I can't as I'm anything but fluent in C) Skip configuration for Serial and UML installs ----------------------------------------------- Another regression. Possible solutions: - probably related to "Allow skipping...". Needs to use debian-installer/serial-console and debian-installer/uml-console Compose key does not work in D-I -------------------------------- "already reported": find bug number
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