The default XFree86 french layout has been too broken to use for years (there are lots of small mistakes, lack of euro support, alternate key values that make sense on a qwerty keyboard but not an azerty one and so on). Seems at some time it was submitted by someone who actually used it and them morphed in a useless blob by qwerty-users. The tldp francophones-howto (aka french-howto) has therefore distributed for a very long time its own "official" keyboard layout. And I got so tired of installing by hand on each new RH install/waiting for it to get merged I even packaged it in an rpm (guess XFree86 dropped the layout when it was submitted by its author and i18n-friendly distros are all too happy to let us-centric ones ship broken setups to push it into XFree86 proper). This layout was even merged in kbd lately. Anyway the point is this file worked for lots of successive RH versions but somehow broke on RawHide XFree86 recently. This is *very* annoying. Not only no one wants to merge it in the US but normal load do not work anymore ! setxkbmap prints an informative (yes I mucked rules/xfree86, not that it changed anything) Setting verbose level to 10 locale is C Warning! Multiple definitions of keyboard layout Using command line, ignoring X server Applied rules from xfree86: model: pc105 layout: fr-latin9 Trying to build keymap using the following components: keycodes: xfree86+aliases(azerty) types: complete compat: complete symbols: pc/pc(pc105)+pc/fr-latin9 geometry: pc(pc105) Error loading new keyboard description With in the X logs : Error loading keymap /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xkb/compiled/server-0.xkm I suspect setxkbmap can not load non-precompiled layouts anymore (note the right fix would be to merge the fr-latin9 layout, it's not like XFree86 maintainers have shown any intention to straighten-up their french layout in the past years - and the fr-latin9 layout author Guylhem Aznar is not exactly a rookie either)
Created attachment 88488 [details] SRPM of fr-latin9 X layout
>The tldp francophones-howto (aka french-howto) has therefore distributed for a >very long time its own "official" keyboard layout. And I got so tired of >installing by hand on each new RH install/waiting for it to get merged I even >packaged it in an rpm (guess XFree86 dropped the layout when it was submitted by >its author and i18n-friendly distros are all too happy to let us-centric ones >ship broken setups to push it into XFree86 proper). The xkb files that are shipped in Red Hat Linux, are the ones supplied by XFree86.org. If those files are broken, it is because they people who use the particular keyboard mapping and may or may not have fixed it, have not submitted bug fixes to XFree86.org for their keyboard layout. I will not accept new keyboard layouts for submission into Red Hat Linux at all period. If I were to do that, then I am stuck maintaining that layout indefinitely. Any keyboard layout submissions absolutely _must_ be submitted to fixes, as this is an XFree86.org problem and not one central to Red Hat Linux. Then, and only then, will such keyboard layouts be accepted into Red Hat Linux. If XFree86.org refuses this layout, then it is not something that Red Hat is willing to ship either. If there are problems with the map that need to be fixed before it is applied to XFree86.org sources, then the author of the layout, or the body of people supporting the layout need to get together on xpert and discuss whatever problems there are with the XFree86 developers, and fix them until XFree86.org accepts the layout into the official XFree86 distribution. Sorry, but we simply do not have the engineering manpower to continuously patch in people's various keyboard mapping enhancements, and then fix and repatch those patches indefinitely as the official XFree86 files upstream change over time. This is something that needs to be taken care of between the original author(s) and XFree86.org directly.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 64912 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.