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Ok, just when I thought Red Hat finally had licked the damn backspace
problem (at least, if you stay on Linux systems -- interoperability
with other Unixen is still shaky), I upgraded XFree86 (for no good
reason really, other than that the update was available), and got
bitten by it again.  Hopefully, this will save some people some time
and annoyance.  I spent the better part of today tracking it down...

The solution really isn't obvious, because it's not as simple as
termcap/terminfo entries being out of sync with the value of stty
erase, in this case.  It's much, much more sinister.

There is an X resource for xterm, XTerm.termName, which you can set to
force xterm to use a particular term type, if you're not happy with
plain-'ol xterm.  If you leave this unset, it defaults happily to
xterm.  Well, sorta...

What really happens is it defaults to xterm, but the program reads
(and apparently processes) the terminfo entries for xterm, vt102,
vt100, ascii, and dumb terminals.  At some point during all this, the
erase character is changed from ^? to ^H.  Ucky.

The weird thing is, if you set the resource XTerm.termName to "xterm"
all works as you would expect (i.e. erase stays ^?).  So, do that.  :)

If you're interested in the gory details, you can see them here:

  http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=62671

You'd think after 30 years, Unixen could eliminate this ubiquitous and
troublesome problem...

- -- 
Derek Martin               ddm@pizzashack.org    
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