I stand corrected, "This is how Debian 2.2 incompletely provides the
desired feature" is a more apt wording.

> between logins.  But, I being only an egg, I'll comment-on/ask-about a
> couple of your points below:

I wouldn't go so far as to consider you a martian ;)

> > One solution would be to extend getty so that termcap capabilities could be
> 
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this will tend to be hosed if /usr isn't
> mounted for some reason.  Either we dynamically link it (and presumably
> fail to run getty if /usr isn't mounted) or we statically link it (and
> suffer unsightly bloat).  (Unless, as you note, it already links against
> libtermcap for some reason...)
> 
> While relying on the shell to do the right thing seems inherently a bad
> idea, it also seems wrong to put this feature directly into getty.
> 
> Yes?  No?

Yes.  On the other hand:
sparrow# uname -a
NetBSD sparrow 1.4.2 NetBSD 1.4.2 (SPARROW) #0: Sat Sep  9 16:25:46 PDT
2000
root@sparrow:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/compile/SPARROW i386
sparrow# ldd /usr/libexec/getty
/usr/libexec/getty:
	-lutil.5 => /usr/lib/libutil.so.5.0 (0x4001c000)
	-lc.12 => /usr/lib/libc.so.12.40 (0x40021000)
-- 
Ben Collver -- collver@softhome.net
Your fellow-man? Divide the epithet: Say rather, you're the fellow, he the man.