From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021218 Description of problem: control-alt-backspace (C-M-BS) is an important key combination in Emacs, usually bound to kill-sexp-backwards. in phoebe, it is not available to Emacs. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 4.2.99.2 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.start X 2.start Emacs 3.type "foo" 4.type Ctrl-Alt-BS Actual Results: nothing happens Expected Results: "foo" should be deleted Additional info: 1. to see that this key combo is not passed to emacs, type C-h c (describe key) and then C-M-BS - nothing appears in the echo area. if you type any other key instead, e.g., C-h c C-h a, emacs will tell you that C-h a runs apropos-command. 2. usually, C-M-BS kills the X server, so you need to enable the DontZap option in /etc/X11/XF86Config. 3. xev(1) reports C-M-BS as KeyPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2c00001, root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 65848720, (154,149), root:(162,184), state 0x0, keycode 37 (keysym 0xffe3, Control_L), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: "" KeyPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2c00001, root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 65848733, (154,149), root:(162,184), state 0x4, keycode 64 (keysym 0xffe9, Alt_L), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: "" KeyRelease event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2c00001, root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 65849308, (154,149), root:(162,184), state 0xc, keycode 22 (keysym 0xfed5, Terminate_Server), same_screen YES, XLookupString gives 0 bytes: "" some files in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/ mention "Terminate_Server". this is extremely inconvenient.
Please report this problem upstream to XFree86.org's bug report and general purpose email list address: xfree86 The 4.3.0 release is nearing, and few people understand the new xkb infrastructure. I'm unfortunately not one of them. Ivan Pascal, and others working on xkb however should be made aware of these types of issues, so they can fix them if necessary before the 4.3.0 release, of which freeze occurs on Feb 1st. I'm keeping this bug open to monitor upstream changes, and discussions. I'll update the report once a fix is checked into CVS upstream and incorporated into my packages. Thanks in advance.
I did send an e-mail you indicated. in the meantime, uncommenting "keycode 22 = BackSpace" in /etc/X11/Xmodmap should fix the problem.
We don't accept bug reports nor bug report information updates via email. Email is untrackable, and disassociates the email from the problem. I delete emailed bug reports on site unread. Hacking Xmodmap is an unacceptable solution to ship the OS with. This alleged problem is something that needs to be fixed or worked out between you and XFree86.org as I'm not making changes for what I consider to be a 1 user in 10000000 hack that could jeopardize setups of multitudes of other users, and have it called a "Red Hat Hack" by the community. I'm closing this as WONTFIX. If XFree86 checks some kind of change into CVS that is considered acceptable by them, then it will make it into our OS. If they don't consider it a problem, or don't consider any solution, then I'm hard pressed myself to consider this a problem. Inside XFree86, the CTRL-ALT-BS keystroke has a very definite meaning. Any app relying on being able to use that keystroke, is IMHO broken itself. User interface consistency trumps hacks-for-emacs-oddball-keybindings.
your rudeness is incomprehensible to me. the Emacs users far outnumber redhat users (especically among the people who contribute to Linux development). Emacs predates X. you asked me to send e-mail to xfree86 yourself.
Sorry, I'm not being rude, I'm being blatantly honest. The issue reported here has been reported by one single person out of all Red Hat Linux users so far. The number of bugs in our bug queue right now is high enough and to prioritize investigation of this issue personally, by me, the sole X developer working on the base OS here, when the XFree86 community can do this themselves, is pushing this trivial issue up the stack, and shutting out users who can't even start up their X server. Low priority and trivial issues will either sit in the queue indefinitely and never get looked at, or we can tell people to report them upstream, where they _will_ get looked at, and get fixed too. Experience in the last month of bouncing xkb issues upstream has resulted in about an 80% rate of xkb bugs being fixed within 2-3 days if not 6 hours of being reported. The entire open source community using XFree86 deserves these fixes, not just Red Hat. And Red Hat is not in the best position to fix these types of bugs, or to judge wether a fix is correct or not. XFree86.org is. Due to bug queue right now, I am defering all xkb and similar issues to XFree86.org to resolve.