Re: gnome-terminal delete/backspace mess

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

jacob berkman <jacob ximian com> writes:
> On 19 Jul 2001 14:44:14 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > Can someone explain what is up with the "swap delete/backspace" and 
> > "delete generates del/^H" options in gnome-terminal?
> > 
> > There is a way this is supposed to work. That is documented here:
> >  http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-opersys.html#s10.8
> 
> these only apply to linux and not to solaris or hp-ux or even older
> versions of some linux distros, right?
> 

In some sense. The Debian policy is a sane way to get things to work
together, that interoperates reasonably well if you log in to those
older systems. In my experience those systems have completely
haphazard/broken del/bs behavior though and would do well to just
start adopting the Debian policy. We need a UNIX-wide standard on this
and the Debian one is fine.

Still - if we want to change the setting for solaris or hpux packages,
that doesn't justify putting it in the dialog. For each operating
system, one setting is Right and the other 3 possibilities are Wrong.
Therefore it should not be a user preference. It's purely a vendor
issue. We could perhaps add a list of broken vendors to configure.in
and modify the defaults according to platform. But it should not be in
the dialog...

I'm happy to add --enable-swap-del-bs and --enable-del-sends-del or
whatever to configure.in, making it a compile-time thing, as long as I
can lose the user-settable options.

Havoc