Checking the keyboard layout has been a long set of hurdles so far, with
several attempts. Originally, the checking was introduced by @lheckemann
in #23709.
The initial implementation just was trying to check whether the symbols/
directory contained the layout name.
Unfortunately, that wasn't enough and keyboard variants weren't
recognized, so if you set layout to eg. "dvorak" it will fail with an
error (#25526).
So my improvement on that was to use sed to filter rules/base.lst and
match the layout against that. I fucked up twice with this, first
because layout can be a comma-separated list which I didn't account for
and second because I ran into a Nix issue (NixOS/nix#1426).
After fixing this, it still wasn't enough (and this is btw. what
localectl also does), because we were *only* matching rules but not
symbols, so using "eu" as a layout won't work either.
I decided now it's the time to actually use libxkbcommon to try
compiling the keyboard options and see whether it succeeds. This comes
in the form of a helper tool called xkbvalidate.
IMHO this approach is a lot less error-prone and we can be sure that we
don't forget about anything because that's what the X server itself uses
to compile the keymap.
Another advantage of this is that we now validate the full set of XKB
options rather than just the layout.
Tested this against a variety of wrong and correct keyboard
configurations and against the "keymap" NixOS VM tests.
Signed-off-by: aszlig <aszlig@redmoonstudios.org>
Cc: @lheckemann, @peti, @7c6f434c, @tohl, @vcunat, @lluchs
Fixes: #27597
