Fwd: Is disabling ctrl-alt-backspace really such a good idea? - no.

[Thomas Jaeger]

This is not a healthy discussion.  We have people claiming that they
can't live without C-A-B, yet they're unable to come up with any
*concrete* situations where they need it.  I don't doubt that these
issues exist, but my guess is that in most of those cases, C-A-B is the
wrong way to go about it.  To make any progress here, we need more data,
it's as simple as that.  Otherwise it's impossible to make any sort of
generalizations as to why these situations happen.  For example, if it
turned out that most of those lock-ups are due to grabs gone awry, it
wouldn't be top difficult to implement and advertise a Release-All-Grabs
key, that would take care of the issue without the need for killing X.

Mike Jones wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
>     I'm one of those users who would prefer that the C-A-B command be left
> as it is, or be modified to allow the ability through some other interface:
> such as twice successive.
> 
>     I have filed several bug reports about issues related to problems with
> X, https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/289898 for example.
This is a kernel bug.  I would be very surprised if C-A-B worked here.

> <snip>    No.  What surprises me is when people are fine with those bugs as
> long
> as there is a quick way to kill the X server that is enabled by default.
> </snip>
> 
>      People do file bugs. Perhaps not everyone, and perhaps not every time.
Well, then it shouldn't be too difficult to come up with a few bug
reports to give others an idea of what's going on here.

> But the problem is still going to be there for that person from when they
> originally filed the bug until the problem has been tracked down, until a
> fix has been written, until its been tested to not break anything, until its
> been patched to the package, until the package as been released, and finally
> the package has been downloaded (and in the case of things like the kernal,
> and graphics support) until the computer (or X) has been restarted.
This is why we need to figure out if there's some sort of pattern behind
the problems people are seeing.

>     Once I submit a bug report about this issue, Can you give me a guarentee
> that I will have an update sitting on my system within an amount of time
> that make it reasonable to not have C-A-B immediately available to me?
If you really think you need it, it's really not that hard to enable it.
 Most people won't need it, so why should it be enabled by default?

By the way, nobody will guarantee you anything unless you're willing to
pay money.


>     Realistically, C-A-B is useful to the points that I personally feel it
> to be necessary to my computing on a day to day basis.
Then enable it.  Most people would probably call such a system unusable
either way.