On 11 Jul, Matthew Dalton wrote:
> I'm not saying that we should drop support for old equipment. I'm saying
> that keyboard configuration should be done in a single place, and all
> programs should get their key interpretation from that configuration.
> This doesn't have to exclude the use of Wyse terminals etc. They would
> still have their own configurations.
That's what the termcap/terminfo stuff is meant to be - the one place
where all this is configured. (termcap is basically deprecated, but
still used by some 10, 20, and 30 year old programs that are still in
use. Maybe 20 years from now everyone will only be using POSIX termios
and termcap and the non-Posix termio can be scrapped.)
But the terminal stuff has to work with stty, since you can choose to
many of the line discipline features. This flexibility is essential for
serial comms.
Then there's X on top of that, which has its own good reasons for being
able to remap keys to whatever you want.
I'm afraid that all this is there for good historical reasons - you
couldn't remove any of it without making Linux unable to be deployed in
certain areas or for certain tasks. Even though doing so would make
things simpler for every user of Linux as a desktop system. Though
lots of heritage stuff would break (e.g. every curses program, like vi).
It's just one of those areas where we pay for the power and flexibility
with complexity.
luke
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