My first DontZap use case while testing F11 beta

[Christopher Stone]

On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 5:50 PM, Peter Hutterer
<peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 09:58:50PM -0700, Christopher Stone wrote:
>> Good thing we will never see a vote on this, because we have to keep
>> the x.org egos inflated.  They could never possibly make a brain dead
>> lemming like decision.
>
> A vote of a non-representative group is still non-representative even if you
> increase the sample size. so I'm not sure how a vote on fedora-devel should be
> worth more or less than a vote on xorg-devel, or gnome-devel, or...
> There are also a number of users that don't know what a mailing list is and
> could not partake in such a vote. (I have evidence of at least one, presumably
> there are others). if you have _actual_ representative data, I'll happily
> listen. seriously.

Actually, I was thinking about a formal vote, like they do for FESCo
elections, or voting for a Fedora code name.  It would not be
representative of every single Fedora end user, but it would represent
the people who contribute to Fedora.  I hope you will happily listen
to the results of such a vote if it ever occurs, which it wont, so the
point is moot.



>
> Please remember too that we're talking about a feature that is accessible to
> every GUI user, not just administrators, developers, geeks, or some other more
> experienced group.

Indeed, please remember that this feature is most beneficial to
non-administrators, and non-developers, and non-geeks or some other
non-experienced group.  It is the experienced ones who are able to
switch virtual consoles and recover from X properly.  It is the
non-experienced ones who need a short-cut key.  Especially when it
comes to handling support calls/chats.



>
> I'm also not quite sure how that has to do with inflating egos. I've spent
> some time last week to actually make you (well, not particularly you, but..)
> happy because:

It's quite simple.  You have to have a hyper-inflated ego in order to
actually think that disabling a crash recovery feature in your
software will somehow be beneficial, or is no longer used or needed.
If the x.org guys didn't have huge egos they would have rejected
disabling the zap feature outright on the grounds that their software
is no where near stable enough to illicit such a change in the
defaults.



> - fedora-setup-keyboard merges this key automatically now.
> - the C-A-B shortcut is enabled during gdm, which is usually when you notice
>  that something output-related is broken.
> - c-a-b works if you start your custom X session, it gets disabled (or not)
>  when gnome-keyboard-properties applies the user-configured settings.
> - gnome-keyboard-properties provides a simple checkbox to enable it if needed.
> - the xkeyboard-config rules allow for different combinations for
>  Terminate_Server, which is an improvement to the hardcoded value before.
> - the keyboard driver now uses XKB instead of its own hardcoded zapping.

This is awesome, I hope that this work goes towards making it easy to
*remove* the don't zap.  As it should be enabled by default.  Should
you happen to be in the extreme minority of people who do not want
ctrl-alt-bksp enabled by default, it is now easy for you to disable
it.  Thanks to everyone for their contributions, now if only we can
get the defaults correct....