Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 152550
newer rpm packages of xorg and XFree overwrite local modifications to keyboard mappings under xkb/symbols directory
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:11:02 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050302 Firefox/1.0.1 Fedora/1.0.1-1.3.2 Description of problem: In order to configure the "windows" keys on the keyboard, to act as CTRL keys, a change in three files under /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols was made. (Those files are: ctrl, pc/pc, pc/is). However, when updating via newer RPMs, those files get overwritten again with the "vanilla" stuff. Which means that those new-and-modified files must be copied from some other place, in order to keep the functionality of "windows-keys-act-as-ctrl-keys". Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install XFree-86 or Xorg, using older RPMs 2. Change those files: /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/symbols/{ctrl,pc/pc,pc/is} 3. Update XFree-86 or Xorg from newer RPMs 4. See the change in those files; they are overwritten. Actual Results: The loss of "windows-keys-are-to-act-as-a-CTRL-key" Expected Results: The changed files should have been left alone. Alternatively, rpm / yum should have asked whether to change them. Alternatively, save the old files as "*.rpmsave". Alternatively (and probably preferably), save the *new* files as *.rpmnew *AND* notify on the screen that a different set of files was seen. (After all, those files in .../xkb/symbols can be seen as a config files, and overwriting locally-changed config files is not good.) Additional info:
The xkb/symbols/* files are not intended to be configuration files. They are intended to be system supplied. This ensures that the files get updated every time a new X release is released, and that the files reflect what was shipped with the new X release. I suggest if you are modifying these files at all, that the files must then contain a bug, and you should report that bug to X.Org directly, so that they can fix the bug directly in the official copy of the files. That gives you an additional benefit of not needing to modify the files to fix the problem in the future. You can file bug reports to X.Org at http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the "xorg" component. Setting status to "NOTABUG" as it is intentional that these files are overwritten.
Thanks, I'll file a report with X.org. Thanks, -- Einar Indridason, EinarI@f-prot.com