On Wed, 30 Jun 2004, Harry Putnam wrote:
I'v very certain I wasn't getting the respective behavior in emacs or less prior to this change.
If you mean the 'backspace' key worked with the old version - then yes
- I can reproduce this.
I have some xterms which I didn't kill after installing the new version - so I'm able to comapre (old and new behavior). I also have an FC2 box - with 179-6.EL - where I can reproduce the old behavior.
Maybe Mike will wake up and tell us what he changed ... : )
No problem. ;o)
Red Hat previously applied a custom patch to the xterm resources file that ships with xterm. Every change that Red Hat has ever made to the xterm resources does two things:
1) It fixes some problem or improves xterm in some way for certain users.
2) It changes xterm from the upstream default, and causes behaviour differences for people who expect the xterm default behaviour. Some of the changes make life very easy for the average PC using xterm user, but make things more difficult for the average old school UNIX user, using a highly heterogenous UNIX environment, with Red Hat OS's connecting to non-Linux OS's, using software such as Hummingbird Exceed, etc.
In general, almost every possible "bug fix" for xterm, fixes one users problem and creates a problem for another user. In other words, it is generally impossible to make xterm work by default for everyone out there in every situation. Different users simply require different application defaults, and there is an extremely large number of users out there with very different expectations for how things should work out of the box.
That means it is basically impossible to make everyone happy, yet we still need to have a "default". Our defaults are generally chosen so that things work best for the largest group of users out there, however that is still a complicated problem to choose defaults for.
The closer we stick to upstream xterm resources, the better, as any problems encountered by people are generic xterm issues. However, there are certain things that xterm defaults to, which are extremely inconvenient for the userbase using our operating system. One example of this, is that the average person using an IBM PC or similar computer, or using some other architecture with a PC keyboard, is used to the "backspace" key deleting the character to the left of the cursor, and the "DEL" key deleting the character under the cursor. That is traditional PC keyboard behaviour, and what the overwhelming majority of all computer users expect to happen. It is for this reason, that this is our intentional desired default handling of both of these keys.
Old school UNIX people however, may very well be used to UNIX terminals or other keyboards which the meaning of these keys is somewhat different.
It's essentially impossible to have a single default work for both groups of people, and it is a heavily debated topic out there. The important thing is to _have_ a default, and generally speaking, default configurations for computer software should really reflect what the largest group of users of the software expect to be the common behaviour. Since the xterm defaults do not reflect the behaviour of what the majority of users expect, we have to customize the default xterm configuration to make things work like most users expect. The side effect of this, is that users prefering traditional UNIX behaviour, or using software such as Exceed, may need to customize their xterm resources manually to get a configuration that works within their environment.
Over time, we've gained a number of such divergences from the upstream xterm resources. The xterm 191-1 package no longer has any Red Hat customizations - it is stock xterm with no resource modifications. So anything that is now "broken" in the eyes of a user, is "broken" so to speak in the default upstream xterm - where "broken" is of course entirely within the eyes of the beholder, and will vary from person to person.
The purpose of the exercise, was to see just what default xterm resources people consider "broken", and to re-enable the Red Hat customizations for those issues where deemed necessary. If any of our customizations aren't missed, we can possibly drop them, and the closer we are to upstream xterm, the less maintenance overhead there is, as well as the less problems the upstream maintainer of xterm will see from Red Hat OS users (theoretically).
So far the experiment has went well, and I've got a list of things that I plan on re-enabling soon.
Thanks again to everyone who has tested xterm and posted back to the list their experience and feedback!