Bug#179286: please justify wontfix
If this bug is going to be marked wontfix, I think a justification is
in order. Enabling "eightBitInput" (which Henning has correctly noted
is a misnomer) by default clashes with non-7bit characters, making it
unreasonable for any application using a terminal to attempt to treat
octets with the 8th bit set as meta keys. Not only does the default
value of this setting cause problems for users who need non-7bit
characters; a multitude of applications (most notably IRC clients but
also others) fail to interpret bit 8 as meta, causing an endless
stream of new user hassles and support questions. These applications
are behaving correctly in supporting an internationalized/multilingual
environment; "fixing" them to accept bit 8 as meta would be a major
step backwards.
Another related bug is the default setting of utf8Title to false,
which causes xterm to disregard the locale's text encoding and treat
window title strings arbitrarily as Latin-1. Like "eightBitInput",
this resource is also misnamed. It should be named "Leave my title
string alone!" as the man page explains that setting it to true merely
causes xterm to skip the munging.
With UTF-8 as the default text encoding starting with Etch, xterm's
active hostility towards non-ASCII-only locales really needs to be
treated as the bug it is, and fixed. I would prefer to see it fixed
upstream as well, but at the very least Debian should fix it, by
adding the following the the app-defaults file:
XTerm*eightBitInput: false
XTerm*utf8Title: true
The man page should also be patched accordingly.
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