[ On Wednesday, April 26, 2000 at 15:36:24 (-0400), Andrew Brown wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: rc.d (Was Re: run levels (was Re: The new rc.d stuff...))
>
> oh yeah...ttyflags uses /etc/ttys as well.  that's probably a good
> reason for leaving *out* information about processes not attached to
> ttys.  although they could just be "attached" to /dev/null...

My point was that ttyflags was redundant and should be taken over by
ttyaction, regardless of what happens to 'init' and/or /etc/ttys.

> inittab doesn't seem to have much to do with ttys...more with just
> making sure something is running.  the fact that the process that died
> was using a tty seems to be beside the point.

Unfortunately so long as init itself directly starts getty (i.e. so long
as one doesn't convert 100% to something like the SysV ttymon/portmon),
and so long as one does want to keep utmp/wtmp-style accounting, it's
necessary for init to be responsible for writing the session termination
records, and *that's* the real reason init needs to know something that
can be related in some way to the tty name.  In SysVr3 the "id" is a
separate unique identifier and both this "id" and the "line" are put in
the various utmp/wtmp entries (the former by init, which doesn't
directly know about tty name, and the latter by getty); but in BSD the
"line" is always the actual tty name (with the supposedly redundant
"/dev/" stripped off, of course) and init never creates the initial
utmp/wtmp entries (those are done by login).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>