<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> Daniel Stone wrote: <blockquote cite="mid20090331034932.GA23865@fooishbar.org" type="cite"> <pre wrap="">On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 03:38:38PM -0400, Gerry Reno wrote: </pre> <blockquote type="cite"> <pre wrap="">Users killing their X server with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace is not by any means a rare occurence. We all wish it were. And in the total tens of millions of worldwide installations, the use for that purpose, far outweighs any usage among the tiny Emac user community. And further, the impact to making such a change becomes an entire worldwide problem. If Emacs users have a problem with a keystroke conflict then they need to create special xorg.conf files that eliminate that conflict for them. And not expect the entire world to have to put up with a hugely disruptive change all for the benefit of one small community. </pre> </blockquote> <pre wrap=""> For the nine millionth time, it has nothing to do with Emacs. Here's what it comes down to: you want the default to be optimised for the X server locking up or crashing in such a way that it needs to be force-killed, knowing that most of the people who make use of that are perfectly capable of creating a configuration file; whereas the people who don't know what it is or does or how to create a configuration file, have to create a configuration file. No. EOT. </pre> </blockquote> <tt> The default needs to remain as enabled.  Because otherwise you are taking functionality away by default that has proven very useful for a long time.  In changing this default you are requiring that every user or sysadmin must create special entries, special install procedures to reenable the functionality.  Further, absolutely no one has ever complained to me about accidentally hitting the three-key Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sequence and losing data.  In all the years of using, administering, and managing *nix systems I have not seen any problem surrounding this key sequence.  We're talking many thousands of users.  Users in call centers, network, applications, engineering.  And I've searched countless forums trying to find references to problems with this key sequence and there are none.  Out of millions of installations if there were some big problem needing solved here I would expect to find lots of discussion among real world users.  There just isn't any. So now you propose taking away functionality from users and replacing it with what?  Nothing.  Unless of course each of the millions of users takes action on their part.  And now we end up with a landscape where some system have the expected behavior and some don't.  That makes life miserable for users and especially sysadmins in many companies. The solution used by OpenSUSE as I understand it, calls for a default of enabled but requires the user to press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace twice within two seconds and the first press emits a tone and you must press the sequence a second time while the tone sounds.  This would at least keep the key stroke available by default, would work with present tools which have Ctrl-Alt-Backspace on their menues, and would prevent any of these "accidental" pressings of Ctrl-Alt-Backspace.  </tt><tt>And yet, we hear nothing about this solution from Xorg.  </tt><tt>And at least this solution would enable users who in rapidly increasing numbers are using virtualization on their desktops from having to kill all their virtual machines because they have to power cycle when all they needed was to zap a misbehaving X server which today is a trivial thing. Regards, Gerry </tt> </body> </html>