Re: Bug#777643: general: possibly, some keyboard layouts should use U+22C5 DOT OPERATOR instead of U+00B7 MIDDLE DOT
Christoph Anton Mitterer <calestyo@gmail.com> writes:
> It seems to be quite logical that actually the dot multiplication sign
> is meant, it's on the same key then the cross multiplcation sign, and in
> the group of arithmetic operators.
Whether that was intended or not, that's not what people actually did when
they made those keyboard layouts. They did not put the dot multiplication
sign on that key; they put the middle dot symbol on that key.
Those keyboard layouts now exist, and changing something like that is
almost never worth the trouble, for exactly the same reason why we're not
going to remap the default keyboard layout to be Dvorak even if it's
better than QWERTY.
If you want a different keyboard layout, you pretty much need to make a
different keyboard layout, and then convince people to use that instead of
the existing one. Changing an existing one, even if you think it made a
logical error, seems like a really bad idea.
That's even apart from the fact that diverging from upstream in an area
like this seems like an absolutely awful idea.
I don't think this is an actionable bug report for Debian. It's an
interesting bit of speculation, and it's arguably a consistency flaw, but
it's not something that makes sense for us to do anything about.
(Based on past history, I suspect the reply to this will be 200 lines
about why I'm wrong, so I'll mention in advance that I'm highly unlikely
to say anything further on this bug report and I'm happy for others to
have the last word.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Reply to: