F11: xorg decision to disable Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Anders Rayner-Karlsson anders at trudheim.co.uk
Tue Mar 31 12:39:22 UTC 2009


* Giancarlo Niccolai <gc at falconpl.org> [20090331 13:40]:
> Dropping you to a VC and having a system stable enough to be able to do  
> anything useful in that VC (including launching a shell) are two  
> different matters.

I'd be seriously interested to find out what you do with your system
as that does not match my Fedora experience at all. And I spend 10-12
hours in it *a day* and have done so for the last two and a half
years, starting with FC6.

> I had. As a programmer, I often try bleeding-edge software, and often  
> contribute in making it more stable.

I don't run Rawhide, so perhaps there the difference lie. I do have
updates-testing enabled and have not had reason to provide feedback
for many weeks now (last feedback was on the libvirtd/selinux issue).

A proposal would be to have a small separate package in Rawhide (that
never enters a real release) that add the C-A-Bs back in. If you're
cutting edge or developer, ability to zap X could be useful. (And you
know how to enable the feature as well, in a full release.)

> As I said, I am not against turning off a feature by default, even if  
> vital for someone (i.e. for me that, as a programmer,... etc). I am  
> against turning off a vital feature that the people that need it (and  
> need it bad) will discover being turned off exactly when they need it  
> the most. If not for anything else, if not for the "millions" (really)  
> boxes one should spread around during install to explain policy changes,  
> THIS is one for sure.

Reading the Release Notes to discover changes like this is not
unreasonable to expect of technical people. A short link to the Fedora
Wiki with the type of information that has been provided in this
thread explaining how to re-enable "I want to kill X on demand, no
questions asked" should be more than adequate.

I see distinct parallels between A-SysRq-<whatever> and C-A-Bs from a
system perspective. Both are essentially debug functionality and
should be enabled by those that need it, rather than forcing people to
disable it that does not need it.

-- 
/Anders




More information about the fedora-devel-list mailing list