Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 13:11:24 +0200 (CEST) From: hm@kts.org (Hellmuth Michaelis) To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Hackers) Subject: Re: PCVT's death Message-ID: <m0yo4VQ-00000YC@bert.kts.org> In-Reply-To: <199806211432.QAA00255@sos.freebsd.dk> from =?ISO-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Schmidt?= at "Jun 21, 98 04:32:25 pm"
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Søren Schmidt wrote:
> > Is there any reason to make a VT220 emulation more complete than complete ?
> >
> > I don't see the point, really.
>
> Try broadening your mind a bit then, and see what "the competition"
> offers.
Which competition ??
> The console device is much more that just an emulator...
This is _one_ view, Soeren. There might be others.
When i read this ....
>Generalized mouse support (done).
>Cut&paste on text screens (done).
>Accent keys (dead keys) (done).
>Bitmap display (partly done, 800x600 display on VESA cards).
>Simple graphics primitive library.
>To come:
>VESA modes (text & graphics).
>Multi-head consoles.
>Emulator & ioctl as modules (ie very small X only console, or vt100 emu).
>Simple GUI library.
>USB keyboard support.
.. then i guess you are pretty much PC centric. Don't get me wrong, this is
a valid view to satisfy people coming from Linux, SCO, other PC OSes and
Nintendo Game Consoles.
Have a look at a machine room of a larger company. What you see is IBM, Sun
and HP servers having several sorts of terminals as their console device.
There is no mouse, no graphics, no cut&paste, no bitmaps, no GUI, no etc.
I have running many FreeBSD machines in such server environments, and the
only thing needed there is a bare bones terminal emulator without all this
overhead you talk about (or a real terminal instead on an emulator).
Ok, personal FreeBSD machines have other needs, which might be better
served by syscons (or pcvt, where syscons fails or people don't like
the "feeling" which syscons provides).
IMHO, both views are valid. And if there are people who feel better with a
SCO terminal emulation, then they should be able to run it. And if there are
people who feel better with a bare bones VT100/VT220 emulator, then they
should be able to run that.
Pcvt has its flaws. And multi head consoles is i.e. a good thing pcvt should
be able to do. And if i had to start from scratch i would do several things
different.
Every year or so someone pops up wanting to unify the console drivers. And
each time i promise that in case they provide an environment in which pcvt
can live i'll do the porting. Never heard of any of them again. But _this_
would be the right way. Provide a framework in which both (and even more)
console drivers are possible and which is also portable to other
architectures and i'll port pcvt to that environment asap.
Broaden _your_ mind a bit, and accept that there are other views, behaviours
and usages than yours; that would be even more good in your case being a core
team member.
hellmuth
--
Hellmuth Michaelis hm@kts.org Hamburg, Europe
A duck is like a bicycle because they both have two wheels except the duck
(terry@cs.weber.edu)
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