Bug#271542: xlibs: Can't get Meta and Alt to work correctly

[barbier@linuxfr.org (Denis Barbier)]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2004 at 06:32:46PM +0200, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
[...]
> When starting up X, the following behaviour happens:
> 
>  - Emacs does not recognise Meta as Meta, but recognises Alt as Meta,
>    which it shouldn't. Note that if I remember well, Emacs
>    automatically treats Alt as Meta if it thinks the current keymap
>    does not have a Meta. This might be what is happening.

See #255286.

>  - TeXmacs recognises Alt as Alt, but not Meta.

Quite hard to investigate until #255286 is fixed.

>  - sawfish does not recognise Alt as Alt, but recognises Meta as Meta.

See #263073.

> Which makes me very confused as to what could be wrong.

The problem is that changes were made upstream in xlibs to improve support
for multiple layouts.  Some applications are confused and fail to handle
the current keymaps.
So there are 2 solutions:
  a. Fix xlibs.
  b. Fix those applications.
(b) is most of the time trivial and safe (ie. a working configuration
is not broken by applying this patch).  OTOH changes in xlibs are very
tricky and fragile, and AFAICT such changes have currently been
performed neither by upstreams (XFree86 or Xorg) nor by other distributions,
so I am afraid that Debian XFree86 maintainers are very reluctant to go
for (a).

Denis