https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1049304
--- Comment #6 from Peter Hutterer peter.hutterer@redhat.com --- (In reply to Karel Volný from comment #5)
Aside from that, it's not really a bug, the setxkbmap output is not trustworthy.
well ... such behaviour is very confusing
agreed, but at least within X there isn't much we can do. setxkbmap's (and the server's) approach to handling RMLVO dates back to when we only had one single keyboard (pre-2007). Fixing the various tools is generally possible, but no-one has put the effort in, there's just not that much benefit.
if something is supposed to tell me what the settings are and it reports nothing, it is quite hard to tell if the settings are correct unless you have deep knowledge of the subject that you cannot expect from ordinary users ...
and this summarises the problem nicely. setxkbmap doesn't tell you the settings, it merely tells you the value of an unrelated property that is set at server startup and (hopefully) by the tools changing the keyboard layout. keyboard layout configuration is lossy, once you load a layout you cannot go back to the RMLVO designation that created the layout.
the only way for setxkbmap to actually tell you the current setting would be to look at every key and match it up with a generated keyboard layout. given that thousands of combinations, that's not really viable.