Bug#651035: please decide how terminals should report Alt+letter combinations
Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> writes:
> I guess I wasn't clear. The proposal had two parts:
> 1) standardizing on a default sequence to send for Alt+letter combinations
> 2) documenting in policy that advertising the smm capability is a Bad Idea.
> The first part seems to be what you have been responding to, and I've
> already said it's not a big deal to me. The second part seems more
> important, and it doesn't involve changing xterm at all.
I have been mostly commenting on the first, but the second seems to have
the same issue to me. It's not clear to me that it's important for Policy
to say something here.
It sounds to me from your analysis like the primary problem with the
smm/rmm sequences is that one is overriding possibly user-configured
behavior without knowing what the user was really expecting or intending.
But that sounds like a reason for applications to not use the
functionality, not for terminals to stop advertising it if they do indeed
respond correctly to those sequences. And I'm worried about getting into
saying "this part of terminfo is weirdly buggy and probably not a good
idea to use" in Policy, since we could make statements like that about a
*lot* of things.
I do see why you're raising it as a Policy issue, since it's an
interoperability challenge between different parts of the Debian system.
But it seems rather esoteric to me, and I'm not sure asking maintainers to
worry about it is worth it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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