Subject: Re: what's still using pccons ?
To: Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@zembu.com>
From: Luke Mewburn <lukem@wasabisystems.com>
List: tech-kern
Date: 05/10/2001 12:30:09
On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 02:12:00AM -0700, Bill Studenmund wrote:
> > 	a) Rename ttyv0 -> ttyC0 (in MAKEDEV and ttys).
> > 	   This might have unexpected upgrade problems.
> 
> Or an easier thing to do is modify MAKEDEV to forget about ptyv. Mkae it
> so that pty6 (which would naively make [pt]tyvX) make [pt]tywX, pty7 make
> [pt]tyxX, pty8 make [pt]tyyX and so on.

That's a reasonable idea, except that it's got potentially worse
upgrade problems.

However, the idea may have some merit. Instead of not mapping pty6
to ttyv on some ports, we could map pty6 to ttyU (next free slot)
or ttyV (just because it's almost `consistent' WRT the name ttyv).

Given that keeping pccons for install media (etc) is something that
we still probably want, maybe migrating ttyv0 -> ttyC0 and releasing
ttyv* back to ptys, isn't such a bad idea.


> > 	b) Implement SYSV style pty cloning. This has many benefits,
> > 	   a people have been claiming we need it for ages, but we
> > 	   don't have it yet. It still doesn't get around the fact
> > 	   we'll still probably have BSD style entries still around,
> > 	   so I'd like to clean up this ttyv problem.
> 
> While I can see an advantage to always grabbing a new pty pair, if we
> don't have the old-style pty names around, how do you get at a particular
> pty/tty device?
> 
> For instance, with talk, you can say "talk <username> <device name>". How
> do you do that for someone who is logged in over a pty, if we don't have
> the BSD-style entries around?

I'm 99% certain that on solaris you can use something like:
	talk notb /dev/pts/667

Luke.