Subject: bug#40273: installer: No way to input Latin characters with non-Latin keyboard layouts

From: Ludovic Courtès <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Apr 2020 17:20:23 +0200

Hi,

"pelzflorian (Florian Pelz)" <[email-masked]> skribis:

> On Thu, Apr 02, 2020 at 11:45:01AM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> The attached patch fixes that.  I’ve confirmed that it works as intended
>> in Xorg and in the console
>
> Thank you, it works fine, even for entering the LUKS passphrase after
> GRUB in the Linux kernel.  Only GRUB uses U.S. QWERTY layout.

OK.

>> (I’m not sure it works in GDM, but it
>> definitely works in an xterm in ratpoison, for instance.)
>
> GDM retains my U.S. English layout even after herd stop xorg-server

That’s a regression.  Localed was added exactly one year ago to fix this
problem in commit 607fcc75404e2b1fc74affcf372b4a6a789ac55e.  I’ve spent
a couple of hours investigating and I don’t know why it doesn’t work,
especially since it works fine once logged in in GNOME (it’s the same
code, GNOME Shell).

>> I was wondering whether to push the patch as-is or to require people to
>> write:
>> 
>>   (keyboard-layout '("ar" "fr") …)
>> 
>> instead.  Maybe it’s OK to leave the comma here.
>
> Lists seem more consistent with the Scheme syntax.

OTOH, it has the potential of breaking things here and there; also, I’d
rather stay close to XKB.

If that’s fine with you, I propose applying that patch and adding a
sentence in “Keyboard Layout” to document that.

>> However, I noticed that this doesn’t work in GRUB.  Actually, even
>> (keyboard-layout "fr") doesn’t work in GRUB (at the command line after
>> the boot menu), which seems like a regression.
>
> I suppose on GRUB using at_keyboard it worked in the past?
>
> For me there’s no regression because keyboard layouts never worked
> (using usb keyboard rather than at keyboard), see
> <https://issues.guix.info/issue/35585#9>.

Damn it, so it’s this ‘terminal_input’ directive that broke it?

> f5961dd5854cec1ed9a41365836d63aa15256642 for usb keyboard was a bad
> commit (passphrase input was QWERTY, back then usb keyboard did not
> work at all in GRUB menu).

That has always been a problem, see
<https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/39288>.

Ludo’.