Bug#487951: xkb-data: Please document possible layouts, variants and options
Package: xkb-data
Version: 0.9-4
Priority: wishlist
Are the possible keyboard layouts, variants and options provided by
XKB documented somewhere?
After about half an hour of searching on my Debian etch system, I
finally found the file
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst
which contains a nice (if a bit brief) list of the variants and
options. (I assume that is a complete list, since it looks as if it is
automatically generated.)
On hindsight, I perhaps should have started by reading
/usr/share/doc/xkb-data/README.config.gz
which says:
2.4 Basic Global Options
See rules/*.lst files.
which, I guess, is a reference to the above file - but the full path
would be quite helpful, especially for a less technical user...
Would it be possible to add the full path to the above text? Or
perhaps to README.Debian if changing this (I think) upstream file is a
problem?
It would also be nice if keyboard layout-related manual pages had some
kind of reference to where the possible settings are documented.
Perhaps adding the file name "/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst" to
the SEE ALSO section of some keyboard-related manual pages like
keyboard(4) and setxkbmap(1) would be helpful.
Another idea would be to automatically generate a manual page out of
/usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst (or from where that is generated),
and then linking to that from the above manual pages. (This would
perhaps be cleaner since most other X server options, like the options
for various graphics cards, are documented in manual pages, and it
would solve the "full path vs. unchanged upstream file" problem.)
Hmm, "dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" appears to give me a list of a
couple of the possible options and variants - perhaps it could also
say that the file /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/base.lst (or the
autogenerated manual page I suggested) contains a full list?
--
-=- Rjs -=- rjs@cs.hut.fi, Riku.Saikkonen@hut.fi
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