Re: [tlug] !!!OT!!! raw cd copy

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jim" == Jim Breen <jwb@example.com> writes:

    Jim> I'm interested to know where Mandrake and Redhat are "broken"

Most "traditional" Linux users like to be able to _selectively_
upgrade their software from the upstream sources.  This is often not
possible with Mandrake and Red Hat because they will make pervasive
changes in a suite of programs (gcc + binutils, XEmacs + Emacs +
window managers) to make them "work better together".

For example, when XEmacs 21.4 came out, we had a rash of reports from
Mandrake users that they couldn't use the Alt key, XEmacs was broken.

It turns out that what happened is that like most traditional Unix
programs, XEmacs uses Meta as the second modifier keysym.  However,
many of the ports from Windows use Alt.  So Mandrake changed all of
the window managers to use Meta for window manipulations, and hacked
XEmacs so that both the Alt and Meta keysyms from X were internally
converted to the Meta keysym.  This produces a smoother working
Mandrake system.  But ...

When people upgraded to the new XEmacs, this stopped working because
the Alt keysym, untranslated in a vanilla XEmacs, wasn't bound to
any function in XEmacs.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
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