Subject: Re: New release of uwscons with improved multilingual support
To: Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer@informatik.fh-regensburg.de>
From: Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>
List: tech-kern
Date: 03/16/2001 17:11:18
Hubert Feyrer wrote:
> Happy Birthday! Nice habit to make us a present instead of asking for one
> ;-)

Thanks! :)

> > - wsconsenc(8) is a new command to set per screen display encoding
> >   (stateless). Each virtual screen remembers its own encoding so you can
> >   have an ISO-8859-1 console and an UTF-8 console on the same machine and
> >   switch between them. Stateful encodings like ISO-2022-JP are switched
> >   by escape sequences.
> 
> can this be merged into wsconsctl ?

wsconsctl does something different. It's used to configure virtual 
screens mostly at boot time. Once screens are configured, wsconsctl 
is seldom executed by user. 

At first wsconsenc was implemented as part of wsconsctl, but I 
split it to a separate program for that reason. I'm not sure 
which is better. -_-a

> Documentation. As far as I understand, the whole wscons subsystem is
> undocumented, and it would be nice to have some documentation available
> for it, so people can switch their platforms to wscons more easily. I see
> Reinoud fight on arm platforms, and I think if the required interfaces
> would be documented, it would help.

Although NetBSD has clean design over other OS'es in many aspects, 
it's also true that most of the technical details on kernel are not 
documented yet. wscons isn't an exception.

IMHO, it's not necessarily difficult to port wscons to other platforms
without documentation. What exactly is he fighting against?

> Also, is there some interface that allows reading text that's on a certain
> console, and emulate some user input from the keyboad, so we can implement
> cut&paste on the console?

Such an interface isn't there yet, but shouldn't be hard to implement
technically. We may need to have a `gpm'ish mouse driver for wscons
before doing it. 

Jun-Young

--
Bang Jun-Young <bjy@mogua.org>