Backspace and Delete keys in kbd

[alexander@…]

Currently, the book tells the reader to determine whether Backspace and Delete keys are wrong in his keyboard layout, and fix this with a small loadkeys snipped to be used via KEYMAP_CORRECTIONS.

However, a patch for kbd exists that corrects all such cases for i386. Shouldn't we apply it instead?

​http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~alexander/patches/kbd-1.12-backspace-1.patch

[Matthew Burgess]

I'd really like this to go upstream! Is Andries Brouwer still maintaining kbd?

Federico Lucifredi now maintains "man", Adrian Bunk got util-linux and Michael

Kerrisk got "man-pages", but I can't see whether anyone actually took over "kbd".

Anyway, I'm happy for the patch to go in the book - does this mean we can drop the KEYMAP_CORRECTIONS setting too? It looks as though that variable was only ever designed to fix errors in the keymaps, right? If so, I'd prefer to patch, rather than workaround bugs in, the upstream sources.

[alexander@…]

KEYMAP_CORRECTIONS still has some use even with this bug fixed. Suppose that someone wants (i.e. has a preference that may or may not be different from other people's preferences) to change the key combination needed to produce the Euro sign from AltGr+5 to AltGr+E.

[Matthew Burgess]

Thanks Alexander. So, we need to apply the patch to kbd in chapter 6 and in chapter 7 change the example starting at "In some keymaps, the Backspace and Delete keys..." to something else. Your example about changing the preference for a Euro symbol seems like as good as any. You wouldn't have any time to get some words together for this by any chance, would you? :-)

[Matthew Burgess]

I think this is fixed in trunk now. Please re-open if I've misunderstood the kbd-1.12-backspace-1.patch that's currently in the book.