My first DontZap use case while testing F11 beta

[Peter Hutterer]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 09:58:50PM -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 8:18 PM, Tom "spot" Callaway
> <tcallawa at redhat.com> wrote:
> > http://who-t.blogspot.com/2009/04/zapping-server.html
> 
> Excuse me Tom, this article is so bad I have to rip it apart.
> 
> > Assume that the server never supported zapping in the past. Now we add a feature that immediately and without asking terminates your session, shuts down all applications, logs you out, brings down your wireless network in the process, shuts down your VPN and generally makes the computer giggle at you.
> 
> That is one way to look at it. You could also see it as adding a cool
> innovative new feature which allows inexperienced users to easily
> recover from a bad X state.
> 
> > Experienced users will benefit from zapping. So make it accessible to them.
> 
> No. Inexperienced users will benefit from zapping.  So it should be
> enabled by default.
> 
> Could you imagine if this was actually put up for a vote?
> 
> "Stay with default" option would be hands-down winner.
> 
> Good thing we will never see a vote on this, because we have to keep
> the x.org egos inflated.  They could never possibly make a brain dead
> lemming like decision.

A vote of a non-representative group is still non-representative even if you
increase the sample size. so I'm not sure how a vote on fedora-devel should be
worth more or less than a vote on xorg-devel, or gnome-devel, or... 
There are also a number of users that don't know what a mailing list is and
could not partake in such a vote. (I have evidence of at least one, presumably
there are others). if you have _actual_ representative data, I'll happily
listen. seriously.

Please remember too that we're talking about a feature that is accessible to
every GUI user, not just administrators, developers, geeks, or some other more
experienced group.

I'm also not quite sure how that has to do with inflating egos. I've spent
some time last week to actually make you (well, not particularly you, but..)
happy because:
- fedora-setup-keyboard merges this key automatically now.
- the C-A-B shortcut is enabled during gdm, which is usually when you notice
  that something output-related is broken.
- c-a-b works if you start your custom X session, it gets disabled (or not)
  when gnome-keyboard-properties applies the user-configured settings.
- gnome-keyboard-properties provides a simple checkbox to enable it if needed.
- the xkeyboard-config rules allow for different combinations for
  Terminate_Server, which is an improvement to the hardcoded value before.
- the keyboard driver now uses XKB instead of its own hardcoded zapping.

With the exception that the default is still disabled, everything around is
now working properly and pretty much like layouts generally do.
I'm sorry that you don't like the new default, but at least I've tried hard to
make it as easy for you to enable it again should you need it.

Cheers,
  Peter, who asks for a at least a polite tone in the reply.