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Re: vax wscons setting questions



Many :-)  We fixed graphics support in the late 90's on 3100's with X11 as well.

But I did not refer specifically to wscons, I referred to that you don't create device nodes for devices that are not there.

-- R

Den 2024-02-04 kl. 13:43, skrev Johnny Billquist:
So, how many machines have you been running where wscons would even be an option?

Of all the VAXen I've been running, I guess I could possibly have used wscons on my 4000/90, once the graphics was somewhat working. But I've never used the graphics console. I've been using serial all the time. So definitely for me, wscons have never been even a topic.

  Johnny

On 2024-02-04 09:38, Anders Magnusson wrote:
It may go back to something else I think.

I have never given a thought to the fact that I need to add new entries in /dev for new devices, it has always been a natural thing to do, wscons or not, but it might be that people expect a devfs to be present these days.

-- Ragge


Den 2024-02-04 kl. 01:33, skrev Johnny Billquist:
Well, I would argue that *very few* ever thought about using wscons on VAX. Most would have been using a serial console, or else the simple bit mapped console straight up.

I certainly never even considered using wscons on VAXen. Although I have been running VAXen more or less continously for about 30 years.

  Johnny

On 2024-02-04 00:55, Mouse wrote:
+    makedev wscons
i'm surprised it is 2024 and we're doing this.
Doing what?  [...]

[tsutsui@]

He also said "please do" so I assume it's obviously
"to add wscons target to the default MAKEDEV all op"

Hm, that didn't seem obvious to me.  I read it as, to expand a little,
"I'm surprised it's 2024 and we're still doing something this
backward" (with the "please do" being something along the lines of
"please do it, since that's how we still have to do it"). Perhaps I've
just seen too many people say things like "I'm surprised it's [date]
and [thing]" with meaning clearly (usually from additional text) of
"how come we're so behind the times".

But, in this case, as mrg@ clarified,

that it took until 2024 to have this patch proposed.

so I clearly was misreading.  My apologies.

that means anyone who has been using wscons on vax has been manually
setting it up for a very long time....

Has anyone?  I was under the impression - though formed mostly from
absence of evidence, not evidence of absence - that vax has been mostly
going unused ever since the broken compiler, the one that couldn't
self-host, was dropped in.

It also wouldn't surprise me if the few diehards who have been using it
all this time have been upgrading existing installs, which for the
first switch to wscons likely meant manual fixups and since then have
been using existing /dev entries.

Or have been using some other X, such as MIT X.  I sure know my few
brushes with X.org on non-peecee hardware have hardly enamoured me of
using it in cases where it's not actually needed (in my experience,
such need is most commonly for hardware support reasons).

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