Representing a diminishing minority, I have to say that I still want
  the <- key to generate a DEL, and no key (except CTRL-H) to generate
  ^H. I could not care less what the key marked "delete" produces. Yes
  this means fighting a never ending battle against gtk/gnome/everything
  else.

I agree; I grew up with a vt52 and a real DEL key, placed more or less
where the PC puts BS.  I actually don't mind that the 'delete' key
deletes forward, and that gnome apps treat the BS key as DEL in typing
windows.  One of my goals is to have those behave as expected from a
windows users point of view.

I'd like to see NetBSD support a way to achieve this fairly easily;
this whole "should the backspace key send BS when doing
console/terminal emulation, or be treated like the DEL key that ought
to be there" question basically has two camps.

The current situation has a number of kludges; right now the BS key on
the pc keyboard I'm typing on sends ^H.  Bash copes with this, perhaps
because erase is set to ^H.  When running 'emacs -nw' in an xterm,
emacs apparently decides to treat ^H as \0177 in order to cope with
this brokenness.  The erase=^H setting gets propagated somehow across
ssh to a remote netbsd system, where the same emacs mapping happens.

I suppose what is needed is an xterm prefernce that says to map the X
keycode for BS into DEL (not Delete), and then not to do all the
erase=^H kludges.  Trying to remap the keyboard is problematic because
most of the GUI apps want to see BS to delete backwards.

Sorry if my rambling offends; I have been struggling with this ever
since XF864, or even before if you count X app issues, and I'd like to
see a simple way to solve it, since I think all of us former 'real
terminal' users are in the same boat.

-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt@ir.bbn.com>