On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 11:54:27AM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:
> I realize you probably know all of this, but:

Actually, there were a few things I hadn't heard before.  Thank you for
the excellent rundown.  At one time I owned and used a vt320 terminal, but
I seem to remember I set the getty to vt320 and it just worked.  I've never
seen a vt100, but I've read it has both a <X] key and a backspace key.  I
guess Johnny's right the <X] mapping would be more convenient, but I don't
think it is the only acceptable mapping.  I am accustomed to keyboards for
different platforms having keys in completely different places, for example
HP keyboards with ESC just left of the left shift key.

It would be nice to map the keyboard in a single place.  For example,
remapping the PC [<- Backspace] to 0177 in the wscons vt100 emulation, and
having that take effect both on the console and in X.

> This weekend I installed an ultra5 over a serial console with kermit
> on i386 running current.  Typing the backspace key resulted in ^H on
> the single-user shell.  So our erase-is-^H decision is not universal.
> Arguably, remote systems should expect DEL in the pty stream.

It looks like the sparc64 sysinst and /bin/sh are linked to libtermcap.
The .profile in the install image sets the terminal type to sun, and the
sun entry in termcap.mini has a capability kb=^H.  Why doesn't ^H backspace?

Some time ago I installed an ultra10 using tip in an xterm.  I don't
remember using backspace within sysinst.  On my first login the getty
defined my terminal as sun-ss5, which had to be changed.

> But, I realize that different people have different preferences.  So
> it would be really nice to have a global setting (at build time, or
> compile) that defined whether the key that is where DEL should be
> should generate 0177 or 010, and have all the other decisions flow
> from this one setting.

I agree.

Ben
-- 
Never wear your best pants when you go to fight for freedom.