Comment 6 for bug 985065

Let me see if I'm reproducing everything properly.

I've added the French (alternative) layout as first listed before US.
After rebooting, the indicator menu shows French (alternative) selected.

setxkbmap looks correct:

xkb_keymap {
 xkb_keycodes { include "evdev+aliases(azerty)" };
 xkb_types { include "complete" };
 xkb_compat { include "complete" };
 xkb_symbols { include "pc+fr(oss)+us:2+inet(evdev)" };
 xkb_geometry { include "pc(pc105)" };
};

xprop -root | grep XKB looks ok
_XKB_RULES_NAMES_BACKUP(STRING) = "evdev", "pc105", "fr", "oss", ""
_XKB_RULES_NAMES(STRING) = "evdev", "pc105", "fr,us", "oss,", ""

And gconftool-2 -R /desktop/gnome/peripherals/keyboard/kbd shows fr oss:

 options = [terminate terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp]
 layouts = [fr oss,us]

not sure why there's a double-space between 'fr' and 'oss' there. Might be relevant?

Anyway, despite all this the layout behavior is still US-style. For instance, the 'm' key prints an 'm' whereas with fr oss I gather it should be printing an ','.

Then I run sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration. I select "Generic 105-key (Intl) PC", "French", "French - French (alternative)", "The default for the keyboard layout", and "Right Alt (AltGR)" for compose key.

After this, the keyboard seems to be working in fr oss mode. 'm' prints ',' and other keys seem remapped differently. However I notice the indicator menu icon shows 'en' (but clicking on it shows 'French (alternative)' - so that's inconsistent.)

Logging out, the login screen's indicator shows fr/French (alternative). Logging in still shows fr/French (alternative), however checking on a gnome terminal window, 'm' is back to printing 'm' instead of ','

So something is different between what is done when executing dpkg-reconfigure vs. when it's done via gnome. Also, I guess this rules out that there's a simple bug in the keyboard configuration map itself.

Think the next action should be to compare what these two configuration mechanisms do for diffs.

Also, at this point I'm betting it's something ubuntu-specific or debian-specific going on here, so I'm going to hold off forwarding this upstream to suv until we understand it better.