Re: [D-I] Please test Debian Installer with console-setup (3rd version)
On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 06:57:34AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
> Quoting Luca Favatella (slackydeb@gmail.com):
>
> > Italia - Georgiana <-- I never heard about this...
>
> Well, apparently, there *is* a "geo" variant for Italian layout as
> well as for French.
>
> Don't ask me why....
Actualy the answer is simple. The keymaps of XKB are organized in such
a way that the French file should support all people living in France -
no matter how few or how many are these people. You can expect that in
the future the lists of the layouts for France and the layouts for Italy
will become even bigger. Don't think of these lists as lists of Italian
of French keyboards - they are not this. These lists are sort of
filters that allow the keyboard configuration programs to present the
user with a much shorter list than the list of all existing layouts - a
list that includes only the layouts that are used in the teritory of the
user. When some layout is used in many teritories then this layout will
be includes in the lists for all these teritories.
Now consider for example the Georgian layout based on AZERTY - this
layout can be used only on teritories where the keyboards are imprinted
according to the AZERTY layout. So fr(geo) is a layout for France and
it has nothing to do with Georgia.
The layouts in XKB are not language-based and there are many good
reasons why this is so. You can organize some filtering for "useful"
layouts, but with time this filtering will become so distant from what
the upstream is providing us that it will become a nightmare to support
it.
Anton Zinoviev
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