* Robert Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Sun, 24 Aug 2008, Ed Schouten wrote: > >> * Robert Watson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>> So users using slightly old versions of screen, etc, shouldn't appear >>> in finger(1), w(1), or receive messages from biff(1), talk(1), >>> write(1), wall(1), shutdown(8), and dump(8), all of which (I believe) >>> rely on utmp(5) to determine who is logged in and where? I'm sure >>> that quite a few of these are of diminishing significance in the >>> current world order (certainly biff is), but I'm not convinced that >>> we should exclude users on historic tty devices from receiving >>> advance notice of system shutdowns or dump events. >> >> Right now we're actually digging up the entire dynamic vs static >> linkage discussion again. If people run a dynamically linked version of >> screen, xterm, etc, they are not affected (except libc.so.6 of course). > > I'm not sure I see such a tight congruence: historical applications don't > use the POSIX PTY calls, since they didn't exist or were unreliably > implemented for many years. Instead, applications embedded the pty > allocation policy in the same way they embed the BPF allocation policy, > which is to search a series of hard-coded names until they find a match. > >> The current /etc/ttys already seemed like an improvement when compared >> to the old one, where we spent 2 out of 3 entries on commonly unused >> PTY names. What kind of ratio do you propose? > > For 256 lines in /etc/ttys, you can keep people's systems working with > older applications. Doesn't seem like a big sacrifice -- it's not like > we're forcing Giant to be kept on part of the kernel, etc.
Okay. Sounds okay. That means we've basically switched the priorities. First we had: - 512 entries for pty(4) - 256 entries for pts(4) Now we're going to switch it to: - 256 entries for pty(4) - 512 entries for pts(4) I'll only add the entries for tty[pqrsPQRS]. -- Ed Schouten <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> WWW: http://80386.nl/
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