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
