Re: consistent keyboard config
On Mon, 15 Sep 1997, Enrique Zanardi wrote:
> Hi! What's going on? Have we all been caught by the xlib6g recompiling
> festival? :-)
I'm sorry. Noone seems to have more time for this. (Actually, I planned to
post the same question here later this day :-)
Note, that this project (kbd cfg) is extremly important and we should
definitely have it working for Debian 2.0. (The problems are getting
bigger: I can't run the current pine version in an xterm, since it makes
backspace behave like delete :-)
Some weeks ago, I wrote the m4-table for my German keyboard and played a
bit with it. I also tried to rewrite the m4 macros with cpp (m4 is really
ugly!) but everything got really worse: cpp inserts spaces all the time
and its hard to turn this off.
So I think we should stay with m4 for a while, since it's actually
working well. If the functionality of the m4 macros have stabilized, we
might consider writing a Perl script that parses some config files and
produces the final keymap. It looks like such a script would be very easy
to implement and would be much easier to read than the m4 macros.
One problem: Some German keyboards have some extra characters assign to
the keys when using the "AltGr" modifier. AFAIK, these chars do not
conflict (I've not seen two keyboards assigning different meaning to the
chars) but some kbds don't use these keys with the AltGr modifier. Thus,
we'll have to find a superset of these chars. (My m4 table only assigns
the "known" chars--if someone knows more keys, he/she'll have to add
them.)
I also played a bit with switching Ctrl and CapsLock and similar funny
things (switching `e' and `r` :-) and was suprised how easily such things
can be done! So I think it would be great if we could keep such things
variable for the different users. (I think we should write some kbd-config
script which asks some questions and generates a /etc/kbd.conf file.)
So, if we continue with the m4 macros for now, I think we have everything
set up for plain console programs. (A few national keyboard layouts are
still missing, though.) What's the next step? I'd suggest to adapt the
programs so they work ok on the console.
Therefore, it would be necessary to hack the readline source to check use
/etc/inputrc unless ~foo/.inputrc exists. Do we have a volunteer here that
wants to checkout the details?
That's all for now. It would be nice if someone with more technical
experience with the kbd stuff could write a list of all things that have
to be done and in which order.
Thanks in advance,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
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Debian GNU/Linux? schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
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