> Juergen Hannken-Illjes said:
> >   Why not including all tables into the kernel?
> 
> Why include any of them in the kernel? I woudl be much better to load
> them from disk.

"hmm, ok, no keymap built in.  i'd better load one...  ok, all i have
to do is type ... but... there's no keymap built in, so i can't type
anything!"

You _need_ a default keymap in the kernel, and it's gotta be the right
one for your kind of hardware.


I'd go so far as i say that:
	(1) you should have the capability of having all supported
	    keymaps built in,
	(2) you should be able to pick a default,
	(3) you should be able to specify that any given subset of the
	    supported keymaps should be built in.

I.e. if there exist keymaps for French, US, and Finnish keyboards, i
should be able to:
	(1) compile all of them in,
	(2) specify any one of them as the default, and
	(3) compile any subset of them in, say, just French and
	    Finnish, or just US.

You don't want to require _all_ keymaps always, because of space


constraints.  It doesn't matter if each is only 1k (or whatever), 1k x
15 is a cost that you can't necessarily pay on a small-memory machine
or on a boot disk.

You want to be able to compile all of them in, for fully generic
kernels.  You need multiple, in the case where your kernel may run on
systems with several (but not all) types of keyboards, say, only
German and French.

You want to set a different default, because some audiences for
distributions may not be the US, or even English-speaking countries.
For instance, if somebody did a NetBSD CD-ROM distribution in Germany,
they might want to include various keyboard types, but default to the
German key mappings.


It's actually not too hard to do all of this...


chris