This is the mail archive of the cygwin-apps mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Opinions solicted for changes to tty names in 1.7.10


On 14 June 2011 21:36, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> After some discussion with Corinna, I'm thinking about making a change to
> the tty naming in Cygwin as part of the removal of CYGWIN=tty.
>
> (In case you haven't noticed, CYGWIN=tty, is no longer supported in
> snapshots. ÂIf you do have the tty option set you get one warning per
> session telling you to unset it.)
>
> Since the only thing using Cygwin's "tty layer" will now be ptys, I'd
> like to rename /dev/ttyN to /dev/ptyN. ÂI've already added /dev/consN
> support for consoles but I'd like to change that so that consoles are
> represented as /dev/ttyN instead.

Makes plenty of sense.

The only concern I see is that BSD PTYs (as previously used on Linux
as well, IIRC) are called "pty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]" on the master side,
whereas they're "tty[p-za-e][0-9a-f]" on the slave side. Therefore
calling the slave side "ptyN" could conceivably cause issues.

Is the Unix98 scheme ("/dev/pts/N") that's used on Linux these days
out of the question?

> 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.

Mintty currently only looks for "tty" when cutting down the device
name to fill in the utmp.ut_id field, but that's trivial to change
(and utmp isn't on by default anyway).

Andy


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]