On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 15:07 +0100, Vratislav Podzimek wrote: > Hello everybody, > in the lifetime of Fedora 18, 19 and 20 there have been some serious > issues identified in our Keyboard spoke. The main issue is that with a > one-level layout selection, it is not possible to list keyboard layouts > for multiple languages (thus e.g. Belgian layout was not listed as > Belgian, but as Dutch, because those two languages both use the layout). > The other issue is that it's not obvious which of the layouts will be > used by default (as the VConsole keymap) and last but not least it is > not possible to preview the layout before adding it. > > For those reason, I've started thinking and working on the new version > of the Keyboard spoke. The following link shows what I have right now: > http://vpodzime.fedorapeople.org/reworked_keyboard_spoke.png > > Issues I'm aware of (and didn't make implementing them today): > * there should be descriptive labels visually splitting the screen into > two parts (something like "Available layouts:" and "Keyboard > configuration:") > * the default layout should be bold > * layout switching label should be more visible (italics?) > * the + and - buttons are probably not so catching as they should be > - Should the testing area and treeview with added layouts be swapped > and the +/- buttons replaced with the up/down arrows? > - or should they be marked as important and thus have the blue colour? > > Suggestions and comments welcome! The main problem I see with this is it's unclear what 'default' means. Our 'tricky' users here are, as always, those non-ASCII ones - to recap for those who don't love keyboard trivia, languages like Russian where the 'native' layout cannot input ASCII characters (like Latin letters), so it *must* be switched with another layout (usually US) to input those characters. In Xkb, you actually have two separate layouts defined (each of which can have its own third- and fourth- levels, if you like) and a key combo switches between them. At the console (kernel/'kbd') you can only load one layout at a time, and these layouts use third- and fourth- level switching to implement the alternate layout. So, our standard example user - a Russian - will usually expect to have 'en' and 'ru' layouts available in Xkb with a switcher key, and the layout 'ru' used at the console. We have also taken a straw poll recently and found, overwhelmingly, that those users of such layouts who responded expect the default layout at boot time to be the ASCII layout (us), not that native layout. That is, when they boot the system, they expect the 'a' key to type 'a', not whatever native character is mapped to the 'a' key in their native layout. Now, imagine I'm our intrepid Russian, and I'm looking at the bottom half of that screen, and it says: Layout Default English (US) X Russian What exactly do I expect? Does 'default' indicate that it will be selected at boot time - in which case I want it to be set to English (US)? Or does 'default' also/instead indicate that the layout in question will be loaded at the console - in which case I can't actually achieve the 'correct' configuration (en and ru loaded in X with en as the default, ru loaded at the console) at all? And this isn't even considering the case where someone decides to pick *three* layouts :/ In conclusion: kmscon can't arrive fricking fast enough. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
