[16045] in Athena Bugs
Re: sun4 8.2.8: zephyr under 8.2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Tue Jul 28 20:10:15 1998
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 20:10:08 -0400
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Frank Dabek <fdabek@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bugs@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: "[16042] in Athena Bugs"
> backspace mapped to ^H, but delete worked
> Things were fine under 8.1
I take it this is for a normal login with xlogin? Do you have any X
resources for "XTERM*VT100*Translations" or the like? Do you not use
the Athena dotfiles, or otherwise circumvent the setting of
XUSERFILESEARCHPATH?
Basically, the situation is this: historically, we had swapped the
backspace and delete keys for the Solaris X server at the keysym level
in order to get emacs 18 to work properly. This change has caused us
frequent trouble with X applications which, reasonably enough, expect
to see a BackSpace keysym when the user presses backspace and a Delete
keysym when the user presses delete. So for the 8.2 release we undid
this switch.
Unfortunately, this reversion exposes an inconsistency in Solaris: the
default tty mode sets the erase character to ASCII 127, while the
backspace key in xterm produces an ASCII 8 by default. Our workaround
so far has been to make the xterm translate BackSpace to ASCII 127
using app-defaults, but it's not perfect: if a user doesn't get our
app-defaults because of screwy dotfiles, or has their own xterm
translations, it won't work. (It also won't work for terminal-style
logins or root logins, but I expect to fix that at some point.)
