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Re: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace disabled?



On 2009-05-31_14:03:06, thveillon.debian wrote:
> marc wrote:
> > Jan Willem Stumpel said:
> > 
> >> IMHO disabling an old and trusted functionality is simply introducing a
> >> bug, made worse by keeping silent about it (no word about it in
> >> changelog.gz or NEWS.Debian.gz).
> >>
> >> It must surely be a tiny minority of users who press
> >> control-alt-backspace "by mistake"; I find it hard to imagine even.  But
> >> for users who suffer from this syndrome there has always been the
> >> possibility of specifying DontZap. Forcing it on all users is a Bad
> >> Thing.
> > 
> > 
> > +1
> > 
> +1
> 
> Note to self : disabling "rm" and "fdisk" commands, catching "shutdown"
> and "reboot" commands to make them fail silently unless they are issued
> five times in a row in less than 1 minute, dumbing down all system
> settings and removing root access in KDE4 "systemsettings" (oh! it's
> already been done, good...), don't let myself install "dangerous"
> packages (nmap, parted, ...). Remove root account (oh! not again! It's
> already been done too.). To be continued.
> Don't try to protect people from their ignorance, enlighten them.

Debian does not subscribe to some configuration decisions that are
common practice in the external world. I think silently changing this
feature of X is something to which Debian should not subscribe. I hope
that X, as packaged by Debian, will continue to have this feature 
enabled, regardless of what the rest of the world does. 

I was reminded of this creeping nannyism recently when a new user of
Debian was apparently unaware of the existence of the su command.  He
apparently believed that sudo was the only way to gain access to
super-user rights, and was distraut when it didn't work on his new
Debian Lenny installation. He asked a question that was totally
misunderstood because it was worded in a very misleading way for the
Debian context.

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net


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