Bug#466384: xkb-data: 0.9+cvs.20070428-1 breaks 0.8-17 Finnish patch
I'm CCing this to Troy Korjuslommi who has been dealing with the new
fi(kotoistus) keyboard for long time and been contact with the X.org
upstream.
Hi Troy, the following bug was reported to Debian bug tracking system by
Martin-Éric Racine:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=466384
> The Finnish keyboard map change in 0.9+cvs.20070428-1 breaks the
> dead_macron patch from 0.8-17, among other things. It appears that
> several other deadkeys are also gone.
>
> It should also be noted that the Kotoisuus keymap should never become
> the default, as it *breaks* interoperability with previous keymaps
> and was heavily criticized by the community when it was published.
Yes, it seems that the fi(classic) keyboard layout is broken somehow.
Some dead keys don't seem to work at all according to my quick test in
Debian unstable chroot environment.
On the other hand fi(kotoistus)--which is now the default Finnish
keyboard--works really well. There are some minor changes to
en_US.UTF-8/Compose file which are required and which Troy has already
been pushing forward to the X.org upstream. Currently the dead_stroke
key does not work in Debian--it's quite new feature in X.org
anyway--because Debian's en_US.UTF-8/Compose file lacks dead_stroke
definitions. Upstream has them already, from the following git commit:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xorg/lib/libX11/commit/?id=4d6c45e60ed13d3b0fea10413873d6a74f9d6a3b
If en_US.UTF-8/Compose from the upstream were copied to Debian, then
fi(kotoistus) layout would work almost perfectly. There are only
certain minor differences left in spacing dead keys which don't quite
meet the definitions of the new Finnish multilingual keyboard (i.e.
kotoistus). See
http://kotoistus.tksoft.com/linux/en_US_UTF-8_Compose.txt
Martin-Éric, what is that "community" who have criticized "heavily" this
new keyboard? I have not seen criticism myself. I've been studying
fi(kotoistus) layout's subtleties quite keenly, I must admid. It will
make things much better. It will be the default Finnish keyboard in
Microsoft Windows. It will the standard Finnish keyboard in computers.
It should be the default Finnish keyboard in Debian too--as it is now
in Sid.
I'm aware that certain characters are missing from the fi(kotoistus)
layout--characters which can be produced with the old layout. We have
been discussing this matter with Troy and we agree that those can and
likely will be substituted with adding new definitions to Finnish
Compose file (which does not exist yet). If you are interested in this
matter, you may want to check the following pages:
http://kotoistus.tksoft.com/linux/index-en.html
http://www.iki.fi/tlikonen/kotoistus/ (Finnish)
Coming back to this bug... fi(kotoistus) works well and it must be the
default (as it is). The old Finnish keyboard fi(classic) is broken,
though, at least in Debian Sid. I'll try to investigate it tomorrow.
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