[Pkg-sysvinit-devel] Bug#435287: sysvinit: Please use new -8 option from util-linux

[Moritz Muehlenhoff]

Package: sysvinit
Version: 2.86.ds1-38.1
Severity: wishlist

Since util-linux 2.13~rc2-3 getty has a new option -8 for 8-bit
clean ttys. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=221290

Quote:
| At last I discovered that bug report :) I indeed noticed the strange
| behavior and was never able to reproduce it reliably.  So now it's done,
| and now I understand.
|
| This is not a bug, this is a feature: as said in manual, getty detects
| tty parity and control characters, which is quite nice in many
| situations, but not 8bit ones.  Here, the umlauted letter you type is
| considered as a 7bit character with a 8th bit parity.  The 7 lower bits
| are then interpreted (wrong).
|
| So detection is really not reliable in 8bit environments (be it utf-8 or
| not).  What I suggest then is the attached patch: just adding a -8
| option that makes agetty assume that the tty is 8bits and hence disable
| parity detection.  Adding that option in /etc/inittab for new installs
| should then be fine:
|
| 1:2345:respawn:/sbin/getty -8 38400 tty1
| etc.
|
| Note: with this patch, 8bit characters are just silently dropped (that's
| the expected getty behavior), this is quite neat since you then don't
| even need to backspace your 8bit characters :)

Please update /usr/share/sysvinit/inittab so that tty1-6 make use of this
option.

Cheers,
        Moritz

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO-8859-15 at euro (charmap=ISO-8859-15)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages sysvinit depends on:
ii  initscripts                2.86.ds1-38.1 Scripts for initializing and shutt
ii  libc6                      2.6-4         GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libselinux1                2.0.15-2+b1   SELinux shared libraries
ii  libsepol1                  2.0.3-1+b1    Security Enhanced Linux policy lib
ii  sysv-rc                    2.86.ds1-38.1 System-V-like runlevel change mech
ii  sysvinit-utils             2.86.ds1-38.1 System-V-like utilities

sysvinit recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information