[rant] keeping policy in HAL

[Xavier Bestel]

On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 11:10 -0800, Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 16:58 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> >> Le Lun 1 décembre 2008 16:47, Alexander E. Patrakov a écrit :
> >>
> >>> Apriori, there is no sensible default keyboard layout.
> >> There could be if the hardware started advertising what actually
> >> painted on its keys (and even then many people would want to override
> >> it). Since it does not, you're right.
> > 
> > I think it does. Some entries in the Microsoft support pages tend to say
> > so, at least:
> > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/280725
> > http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304614
> 
> The USB specs have layout as an optional field that most vendors don't
> fill in since it would cost a few cents extra per keyboard to put in
> dip switches or different PROMs for different layouts, instead of just
> attaching different keytops.    Sun keyboards do, and I think Apple do,
> since auto-detection was worth the few extra cents for our users, but
> I don't know of any others that do.

How sad.

> (And because Sun keyboards do, on Solaris, we've always had X ask the
>  kernel for the keyboard layout, from either the hardware or the user
>  settings, and use that to set the X keyboard layout.   I've been
>  working with our HAL team to have HAL do this as well as we're moving
>  to Xorg 1.5, and it seems to be working for us, but it depends on the
>  Solaris keyboard layout ioctls, so won't be generally useful, other
>  than as proof that something better than "us"-for-everyone is possible.)

Maybe Xorg should still try to use it if present, and output a tiny
warning in the logs otherwise, to make people prefer the right kind of
keyboard.

Thanks,
	Xav