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Re: Opinions solicted for changes to tty names in 1.7.10
- From: Andy Koppe <andy dot koppe at gmail dot com>
- To: cygwin-apps at cygwin dot com
- Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 13:28:55 +0100
- Subject: Re: Opinions solicted for changes to tty names in 1.7.10
- References: <20110614203637.GA1128@ednor.casa.cgf.cx>
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