console-conf should tell the user that the keyboard is US only

[Oliver Grawert]

since we have neither locale nor localized keyboard support on ubuntu-core images, one of the console-conf screens should perhaps tell the user about this.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

Can you suggest some wording? I'd assumed that some kind of i18n would eventually get done but maybe not if there no support for different keyboards...

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

we invested quite some time to get rid of all i18n on these images to make them as small as possible ... so hopefully this wont come back (after all the embedded images are not typically used constantly by endusers but drive some embedded system instead ... we should have the ability to ship i18n stuff via additional snaps though, for people wanting that)

i'm not really sure about the wording either ...

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Should it be done as a notice that the only supported keymap is US english, or should we spend time to implement a proper keymap selection process and applying the keymap?

How important is this feature relative to others?

I think there is no question that we can't only expect the world to use the US-English keymaps and that only ever on Ubuntu Core (and being french canadian I have my own preferences this would clash with too); but we need to figure out what is the best way to go about handling this in console-conf -- notice that the configuration here is us-eng only (which seems suboptimal), or implement a complete keymaps selection interface, and figure out a way to ship the relevant localization data in the core snap or elsewhere?

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

well, dont forget that there is no local user at all ... you can not log in locally on these images, only via ssh (which will use the host keymap) ...

if we can ship keymap input data and generate the right one on the fly without having to grow the image/ubuntu-core by megabytes, lets do it ... but if we would need to put localization back in, i'd veto this and just go with a note ...

(do we actually allow usernames that need special chars in the store ?)

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

So I think edge ubuntu-core has the keyboard config files required. Now what? I know nothing about how this sort of thing works (any advice for documentation?).

Do we want to just present a list of layouts? Do the ubiquity style "press the key to the left of the space bar" guessing?

[Seth Arnold (seth-arnold)]

There are risks with "to the left of the spacebar" even for people who think they are using US keyboard layouts: http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/adv2-main-marquee-slide.jpg :)

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

i'd vote for a list, though i'd pretty much like to rip this out again and come up with something that does not grow the image by 10% via pulling in a ton of dependencies.

i.e. as we discussed on IRC we should rather use the cut down bits from the d-i keyboard configuration udeb.
especially in the light that we do all this on a system where you can never actually use the local keyboard apart from typing in this one line with an email address.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Indeed, it's better to leave this as a list. We *do* have some existing logic for detection, should we want to use it (it's in d-i's console-setup), but it's probably simpler to list locales.

Using console-setup (well, keyboard-configuration) is one thing, but it will still need a lot of massaging to get it to python, and to remove years of migration cruft.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

well, all we actually need is the loadkeys binary and the keymaps from console-data after all ... and a sane subprocess invocation in python to call loadkeys with the right keymap file.

this should not be rocket science but sadly the overhead that console-setup and keyboard-configuration add on top (for bringing xorg in sync with the console etc etc) kind of makes it such which is why i'd like us to go with something way smaller here.

[Andreas Mohr (andi)]

@ogra:
"well, all we actually need is the loadkeys binary and the keymaps from console-data after all"
"this should not be rocket science but sadly the overhead that console-setup and keyboard-configuration add on top (for bringing xorg in sync with the console etc etc) kind of makes it such which is why i'd like us to go with something way smaller here."

Such statements seem to cry for an onerous-dependency split (introduce some sub packages which do sanely scope-manage particular sub aspects only - and then successfully solely rely on these minor packages within certain "reduced" "hosted" deployment environments).

(side note: when I see keyboard-configuration requesting information about an __xorg-side__ Ctrl-Alt-Backspace server kill hotkey, I am at risk of getting LAYER VIOLATION stomach cramps as well...)

[Ian Johnson (anonymouse67)]

Just a note that this is still an issue, and we have more messages that will be printed off during the ownership phase from snapd, i.e. see https://bugs.launchpad.net/snapd/+bug/1880156.

I agree that we shouldn't add i18n if it bloats the default images too much, but I think that with some of the upcoming work on the UX around first-boot device configuration / onboarding we should perhaps revisit this.

[Dave Jones (waveform)]

Another note that this is still an issue.

Also worth noting: in Ubuntu Core's first time setup we do require people to enter their Ubuntu One ID (for the purpose of importing SSH keys). With a UK keyboard, the US-default layout makes it slightly tricky to enter this, as it typically includes an @ character and many UK users are unaware this will be shift-2 on their keyboards (rather than the usual shift-'). Presumably, a similar conundrum faces many other non-US-keyboard-using people.