F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Anders Rayner-Karlsson anders at trudheim.co.uk
Tue Mar 31 13:07:15 UTC 2009


* Bill Crawford <billcrawford1970 at gmail.com> [20090331 14:34]:
> On Tuesday 31 March 2009 13:23:05 Anders Rayner-Karlsson wrote:
> 
> > And the BZ's for this observed behaviour are...?
> 
> Why don't you go search yourself?

Because I am not the one experiencing or complaining about this
behaviour. If you are seeing undesirable and broken behaviour by an
application or by the X server itself, requiring you to resort to this
type of behaviour as provided by C-A-Bs - filing bugs against the
parts broken springs to mind as being on the agenda.

As such - you'd know what bugs you have filed, and you'd be able to
provide the BZ id's.

I on the other hand, have not seen the behaviour, don't know which
application you are running that causes the behaviour and therefore
are not in a particularly good position to locate the BZ's.

I thought this was a fairly straight forward path of thought, but it
seems I was incorrect.

> > That is entirely possible. I did a straw poll among my technical
> > colleagues (and included a Senior Director for good measure) and
> > the only one that uses C-A-Bs (due to flaws in suspend/resume) is
> > the Senior Director. No-one else could find a reason to retain
> > C-A-Bs as enabled by default.
> 
> That flaw might not be easily fixed; and in the meantime, until it's
> fixed, what should he do?

Re-enable it, or was that really non-trivial to think of? *confused*

> > Maybe - and here's the rub - disabling the ability to kill X
> > willy-nilly would encourage people to file bugs against the
> > applications that really misbehave, allowing for an overall
> > improvement of stability, usability and end user experience?
> >
> > Or perhaps some people are perfectly content having to shoot their
> > X server on a regular basis because they can't be asked to file a
> > bug... That's real community spirit at play, right there.
> 
> Developers hate bugs that go "suddenly my X server seemed to not be
> responding".  It might be an X server fault, it might be an
> application issue, and in this day and age the odds of most people
> being able to narrow it down enough to make a readable bug report
> are pretty small. The main pain point here is that at the point the
> problem occurs, it's often very, very difficult to obtain any useful
> information.
> 
> Now, if you are volunteering to help ... ?

The term "reproducer" springs to mind. If you don't know exactly what
it is that breaks, you can still describe how to get there. A bug
report with a reproducer is better than no bug filed at all, and being
able to run sosreport and putting together a bulleted list with, for
example:
 * start application A
 * start application B
 * move Application A's window so it completely obscures application
   B's window
 -> X hangs solid

There's a very good chance that someone will be able to a) reproduce
the issue, b) fix it.

If you're writing code, and it's your code that trips the issue, you
can probably write a small-ish program that trigger the problem and
attach to the BZ.

-- 
/Anders




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