F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

[Anders Rayner-Karlsson]

* Rodd Clarkson <rodd at clarkson.id.au> [20090331 03:56]:
> On Mon, 2009-03-30 at 10:55 +0530, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
[snip]
> > I don't think it is appropriate content for release notes since it isn't
> > useful to lead users to read a few threads with hundreds of mails in
> > that context. Fedora release notes is not Fedora Weekly News.
> 
> I'm not suggesting that you put all these threads into the release
> notes, just a url so that hopefully people will read the discussion
> already had (and then hopefully avoid having the same fruitless
> convesation again).

You have an excessive amount of faith in people. This discussion will
be had again (and again), probably by mostly the same people, once
it's rolled out in a release. Same arguments, same flames, possibly a
different list.

I have read this thread with much merriment, seeing hilarious
accusations of conspiracy by closet Emacs users (as if Vim users would
be any better *grin*, tinfoil? first door on the left), shouting from
the roof-tops by a real minority (albeit vocal such) etc etc ad
nauseum as well as more and more far-fetched and ludicrous analogies
being put forth. (I did laugh at the shatterproof glass one..)

I don't think this is necessarily a good poster-child discussion to
stick in the release-notes without a healthy dose of soap+water to
clean it up first. "We resist change" somehow don't seem to quite
match the Fedora that I've come to know.

C-A-Bs is a known key combination, it may occasionaly help in a sticky
situation (not getting covered in syrup in the first place would help
too) but it may also cause people to lose a session and unsaved
work. SysRq's are disabled by default for good reason, and so should
C-A-Bs be, where savvy admins that need the functionality ought to be
capable of enabling it *should the need arise*. (They do *test* things
before they roll them out company wide, right?)

Personally, I've seen some interesting technical bits in this thread,
that you now - thanks to the autoconfiguration of X - can drop in
snippets of xorg.conf (can sysadmins spell "puppet" please?) to
enable/disable very selected bits. It's also a long long time since I
personally had to use C-A-Bs out of anything but lazyness. A wedged X
usually means either a flip to a vc (Thunar in F10 updates-testing
seems to do this recently, and no, I've not filed a BZ - yet) to nuke
the offending process or a hard reboot since keyboard interrupt left
the building.

Right.. I'm late for work and I'll get off my soapbox now.

-- 
/Anders