Re: Making the keyboard work

[der Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> Having an easy to use editor in base would be nice, but wouldn't
> having a fully working keyboard be better?

Oddly enough, a fully working keyboard is just what I already have, and
have had since at least my 1.4T freeze point.  But perhaps we disagree
over what constitutes "fully working".

> Infact, editing files isn't that great when your home/end keys don't
> work.

How about, when they don't exist?  Mine doesn't have any, and it
doesn't seem to have caused me any problems editing files.  Maybe I
just don't use editors simple enough to have problems with this.

(The world is more than peecee-layout keyboards.)

> What's more, I find it embarassing that in this day and age it
> doesn't work.  Can you really take an OS seriously when something as
> basic as the keyboard doesn't work as it should?

There are so many unstated assumptions here this is unanswerable.

First is that the OS _has_ a "the keyboard".  Serial consoles, anyone?

Second is that your idea of how it should work is the only correct one.

Third is that everyone shares your prioritzation of keyboards working
the way you want above other things (like, oh, I dunno, schedulers, VM,
disk drivers) in judging an OS's seriousness.

Personally, I find keyboard support working the way you want - or even
the way *I* want - far, far lower on my priority list when it comes to
taking an OS seriously than, say, device drivers, network stack, and
the VM subsystem.

But maybe that's just me.

That said, if you want to hack on the keyboard support for whatever
port you care about, have at it.  But you might want to pick a more
correct list than tech-userlevel; as far as I can tell very little of
keyboard handling is in userland, unless you're running X (in which
case it seems to me an X list would be more appropriate).

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