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Re: Opinions solicted for changes to tty names in 1.7.10


On 6/14/2011 4:36 PM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> Corinna suggested that I should send a query here to see if anyone knows
> if this proposed change will affect any existing applications which use
> ptys like mintty, emacs, xterm, rxvt, or screen.

I think rxvt will break, but I'm sure that can be corrected with an
updated release. As currently configured, the only explicit references
to "/dev/tty" (note: NOT "/dev/ttyN") are in ptytty.c, as part of the
rxvt_control_tty function.  This function is basically concerned with
ensuring that the active [pt]ty does NOT have a controlling terminal, so
it opens /dev/tty with O_NOCTTY and does various checks.

However, rxvt uses openpty() + ttyname() stuff explicitly for all other
purposes.

rxvt-unicode uses "/dev/tty" in a similar way, as part of its
control_tty() function.  As configured, it uses Unix98 stuff (incl.
ptsname(), posix_openpt(), etc) otherwise.

> Does anyone see any
> problems with this?  Problems can include large wails of protest from
> the user community if you think that will happen.  I can't predict if
> this will be the case or not.  I don't know the purity of doing things
> this way will outweigh any end user confusion.  Or even if there will
> be that much end user confusion.

I doubt most end users will care.  Maintainers of terminals and shells
will -- because those have needed extensive patching in the past, some
of those patches may need to be reverted or revised to work with the new
scheme. Whether this means existing binaries will break until rebuilt,
I'm not sure.  We'll just have to see.

--
Chuck


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