Announcing Fedora 11 Alpha (blink)

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:43 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 11:33 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
[...]

> > In this kind of situation it would be nice to have an unblockable
> > attention key, like SysRq but not so low-level. Something that would
> > simply force the system into VT2 for example, and didn't depend on X
> > working.
> 
> You can't do that, really.  Getting to vt2 requires getting X to let go
> of the hardware, because the vt subsystem is a raging pile of trash that
> we would be _far_ better off just deleting.  Read that again: X has to
> voluntarily relinquish the hardware.  If it isn't responding to c-a-bs,
> it certainly isn't going to respond to any other requests.

OK.

> But nooooo.  Gotta keep having VTs so we can recover when X screws up.
> I mean, it's the unix way.  Which apparently means designing failure in
> from the start, and calling it a feature.
> 
> This is a bad design.  The panic button doesn't make it better, it just
> makes it okay to be even worse than the design requires.  Take the
> training wheels off already.

Do you have an alternative suggestion?

poc