Cleaning up after console-setup mistake in Natty

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Fri Jan 28 12:35:20 UTC 2011


Lots of people have reported keyboard layouts being broken in Natty in
one way or another.  This was due to a merge I did from Debian on
2011-01-05 which worked fine in my tests, but turned out to fail in a
number of common cases.  I've identified two major problems:

 * I added some misguided migration code which broke in the case of
   debconf preconfiguration (which most people use because apt does it,
   but I was testing with 'dpkg -i').  The effect of this was to reset
   the various keyboard settings to the first choice in their respective
   lists: if you have XKBMODEL="a4techKB21" and XKBLAYOUT="us,af" in
   /etc/default/keyboard, then this is what happened.  This also tended
   to result in keyboard questions being asked on every upgrade.

 * Versions of the installer-side keyboard handling code prior to Natty
   didn't always set the 'seen' flag for keyboard questions in the
   installed system's debconf database.  As a result, many people were
   asked the keyboard layout and variant questions again.

I've uploaded console-setup 1.57ubuntu5 to fix this.  When upgrading the
keyboard-configuration package to the new version, if it detects a
migration bug, it takes the old commented-out XKB* values from
/etc/default/console-setup and restores them, which should restore the
correct keyboard layouts for most people.  It will print messages on
standard error saying that it is doing so, but will not present any
debconf messages.

However, if you installed your system with an image from before
2011-01-05, upgraded it to current Natty, and then manually edited
/etc/default/keyboard or used 'dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration',
the effect of this cleanup will be to *erase* those manual changes and
restore the configuration from before you upgraded console-setup.  I
hope that this will cause few problems, as the overwhelming likelihood
is that the previous configuration was more accurate.  I considered
presenting the debconf questions again, but given the significant
confusion already caused I felt that this would not improve the
situation.

Note that all of this only affects people who have upgraded through
Natty between Alpha 1 and Alpha 2.

If there's still a problem after all this, please let me know.  Sorry
for any inconvenience caused!

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]
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