Wayland: automatic keyboard layout detection fails

Since !71 (merged) the startxfce4 script tries to find KEYMAP in /etc/vconsole.conf and set XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT in the labwc environment file to the value. However, it does not handle the case that this variable doesn't exist. On my Debian system where I've never modified /etc/vconsole.conf manually (as in not with a text editor, only through the appropriate system tools) the values set are:

XKBMODEL="pc105"
XKBLAYOUT="de"
XKBVARIANT="nodeadkeys"
XKBOPTIONS=""
BACKSPACE="guess"

The correct value for XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT based on these settings would be de(nodeadkeys), combining XKBLAYOUT and XKBVARIANT. I think that if autodetection fails (produces an empty value, like here) startxfce4 should not touch the XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT setting at all.

For anyone who has the same problem: touch ~/.config/xfce4/labwc/lock to disable the autodetection, and set XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT in ~/.config/xfce4/labwc/environment manually.

mentioned in merge request !71 (merged)

changed the description

added 5. Wayland label

I think the problem is this section of /usr/bin/startxfce4

       LABWC_KEYMAP=$(awk -F '=' -v q1=\' -v q2=\" '
         $1 == "KEYMAP" {
           gsub ("[" q1 q2 "]", "", $2)
           sub ("-", "(", $2) && sub ("$", ")", $2)
           print $2
         }
       ' /etc/vconsole.conf)

It seems to make the assumption that every virtual console keyboard mapping (see localectl list-keymaps) maps to a X11 keyboard layout (see list-x11-keymap-layouts) of the same name. But this is not the case. In fact, my vconsole.conf contains the corresponding xkb settings.

The workaround is to export XKB_DEFAULT_LAYOUT before running startxfce4.

changed milestone to %4.20.3

assigned to @Tamaranch

closed with commit 9fb3995e

mentioned in commit 3a64213b