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Re: Backspace and delete



Just a few queries to clear up.  There seems to be little opposition
and reasonable support.  Unless someone objects soon I think we should
make it policy and start to file bug reports.

Joey Hess:
> My only reservation is, can we actually make this work for all
> programs?  What about motif programs? (I'm thinking specifically of
> netscape, which we don't have source for).

I believe that Motif programs already behave in the way I suggest;
however even if I'm wrong about that I do know that it is possible to
modify their behaviour using X resources or app-defaults files.

Ricardas Cepas claims:
>         95%   of  terminals   in  terminfo   database  use
> Backspace  (^H)  for   Backspace  (including  xterm,  BSD,
> etc). How Debian is going to  live with other OS'es in the
> world if it will put this incompatibility in it's policy ?
> Regarding this Emacs bug usually  it is possible to use F1
> for help.

Linux and other good operating systems already use DEL for backspace.
The problems we've had with this have been the lack of a delete-right,
and a number of programs which have been configured inconsistentely
(notably in X).

Commercial unices generally honour the stty erase setting, and
nowadays telnet even manages to transfer the stty setting across in
many cases so you don't have to type the rune.

He also suggests:
>         1) Somewhere in the base, say ncurses-base postinst
> script user should be prompted

No, noone should be prompted.  It should be made to work without
asking the system administrator obscure questions.

Ian.


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