Keyboard situation - Non-US users dead in water?

[Chris Tyler]

There are a number of interacting issues surrounding XKB at this point,
but the bottom line is that many (most? all?) users using non-US
keyboards are pretty much dead in the water right now.

Putting aside issues with libxklavier and keyboard options, the console
(non-X) keyboard maps, and the keyboard switching applet, it's simply
not possible to select certain keyboards which are in widespread use.

Here's one example: in FC4 and before, the de-facto standard French
Canadian keyboard was identified as ca_enhanced, and it worked
reasonably well. (Note: This is the keyboard that is shipped by Dell,
IBM, HP, etc, and the keyboard that you you would buy at a Future
Shop/Best Buy in Quebec. English Canadian users (such as myself) use the
"us" keyboard layout. All other "Canadian keyboards" are corner cases).

With the current set of XKB data, this keyboard is identified as ca(fr),
and it can be selected manually:

    setxkbmap "ca(fr)"

When selected in this way, they keyboard works perfectly (except for
RightAlt-E which is labelled as Euro on newer versions of the
keyboard). 

However, this keyboard option cannot be selected at installation time,
nor can it be correctly selected after installation using the KDE or
Gnome applets, which expose the corner-case keyboards but don't provide
an option for this one. I'm assuming (from browsing Bugzilla) that
similar problems exist for some of the other international keyboards.

(It's unclear to me where the current (X11R7) set of xkb maps came from.
They're not the legacy maps that shipped with 6.8.2, but they're not the
current xkeyboard-config maps either - perhaps they're a snapshot of
older xkeyboard-config data, since they seem closer to xkeyboard-config
than they do to the 6.8.2 set).

What needs to be done to get this working for FC5?

--
Chris Tyler