From: Dax Kelson <dkelson(a)gurulabs.com>
Subject: Reasons to preseve X on tty7
To: "Development discussions related to Fedora"
<fedora-devel-list(a)redhat.com>
Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2008, 1:36 AM
I would argue strongly that this change should not be made
for the
following reasons (in no particular order):
* The default behavior of X on tty7 has been in place since
the
beginning (almost a decade and a half).
* Long standing behaviors and defaults should not be
changed unless
there is a VERY good reason with a significant upside.
Developers should
tread respectfully in such hallowed places.
* This specific Linux behavior is well documented in
hundreds of
thousand of publications ranging from college text books,
HOWTOs, Linux
books sold in retail stores, blogs, forums, guides, and
training
manuals. Making a change invalidates all that published
knowledge.
* Fedora (and presumably RHEL6) now behaves differently
from all the
major distributions. The axiom about those who ignore
history are bound
to repeat holds here. UNIX "distros" did the same
thing, introducing
frivolous incompatibilities. This fractures the user
community, creating
separate pockets of knowledge and experience for each
system.
* The "exception to the rule" (such as this one)
dramatically increases
the costs of cross-distribution support. It turns 300-page
books into
1000-page books. Similarly one must remember and commit to
memory all
the "exceptions" and swap them in and out of your
mental working set as
needed.
* Fedora is now inconsistent with itself in regards to
where X is
running depending on if you booted to runlevel 3 and used
startx or if
you booted to runlevel 5. When your uptime is 3 weeks, how
do you
remember which method you used to start the GUI?
* Having tty1 be the user's "primary console"
(as mentioned in BZ
465547) is not a worthy goal as desktop (GUI only) users
should not and
do not care what tty X is on.
* Experienced users will try CONTROL-ALT-F1 and nothing
will happen, the
first thing that comes to mind is "something is
broke".
* With the current rawhide behavior, what happens when you
combine this
with fast user switching? The first user's desktop is
on tty1, and then
is the second desktop is on tty7, and the third on tty8? I
tried to test
this in my lab but I suspect video driver problems (radeon)
because my
test machine would lock up.
* Having the X server start on tty7 *from the very
beginning* would get
one less "flicker" without making an incompatible
change.
I support progress, but I hate to see two steps forward and
one back. I
understand change is natural but the change should be well
reasoned with
implications considered and weighed.
To put my comments in "context" and to show that
I'm not just a nutter
with an uniformed opinion, and in a way of introduction,
here's a bit
about myself. I've used (typically in production) every
single version
of Red Hat and/or Fedora ever created (go Mother's
Day!). I started an
ISP and grew it to 10,000 users using (initially) Red Hat
4.2 (not
RHEL), and I was the first person/customer of Red Hat to
earn an RHCE
(Feb 1999). I have minor patches in many different projects
and several
hundred bugs in
bugzilla.redhat.com. I was the official
GNOME RPM
maintainer for a few years around the turn of the century
creating GNOME
RPMs for several distributions for each new GNOME release.
For the past 9 years I have made a living writing Linux
courseware for
multiple Linux distributions and teaching Linux training
classes along
with the rest of the dozen full time instructors at Guru
Labs, a company
I founded with a college friend of mine. I've sold tens
of thousands of
Linux training books. Unfortunately, I don't have the
time to
participate on the lists as much as I would like too.
However, because
of my daily work I get to observe the low level changes and
development
process of many different Linux distributions giving me a
broad
perspective.
Our coureware features extensive labs which have thousands
of lab steps
that exercise virtually all the major software components
and features
thereof. As we update/validate our courseware to work on
the latest
Linux distribution versions, our courseware ends up acting
like a giant
regression test. We end up patching and/or filing many many
bug reports
in many bug trackers.
Uneeded and frivolous incompatibilities between Linux
distros are
particularly annoying to me on many levels. One practical
reason is the
bloat it causes in our courseware. The LSB is fine for
developers who
want to run binaries across multiple distributions, but
Linux Sys Admins
deserve something akin to the LSB that provides greater
consistency at
the Sys Admin level by removing squashing these frivolous
incompatibilities. This is something that has been brewing
in the back
of my mind and I (using Guru Labs funding/resources and
other interested
parties) might tackle at some point.
Dax Kelson
Guru Labs
While I respect your opinions and experience I do think that the reasoning for this
behavior change is good enough. I remember the first time I was told how to switch to tty1
some 7-8 years ago. Immediately after switching to tty1 my curiosity boosted up and I
tried all the combinations ctrl+alt+F2 through ctrl+alt+F12. I am sure many of us went
through a similar experience.
If someone tries one of these combinations (s)he *will* try the other combinations. There
are not too many of them. It won't take too long until the user will end up where
(s)he wanted. And if people still think that this change will bring an utter catastrophe
we might as well put a warning message (just for F10 and maybe for F11) at tty7 saying
that X is not here anymore and is moved to tty1. Won't this solve all the problems?
Orcan