From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jul 28 13:49:14 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) id NAA03081 for hackers-outgoing; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 13:49:14 -0700 Received: from mail.htp.com (mail.htp.com [199.171.4.2]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.11/8.6.6) with ESMTP id NAA03073 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 13:49:11 -0700 Received: from et.htp.com (et.htp.com [199.171.4.228]) by mail.htp.com (8.6.5/8.6.5) with SMTP id QAA20909 for ; Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:48:37 -0400 Date: Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:48:37 -0400 Message-Id: <199507282048.QAA20909@mail.htp.com> X-Sender: dennis@mail.htp.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.0.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: hackers@freebsd.org From: dennis@et.htp.com (dennis) Subject: Re: your mail Sender: hackers-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk >> > > I disagree. Oh, not in the user interface model, but in the file system >> > > and process model. It takes the UNIX "everything is a file" a logical >> > > evolutionary step forward. >> >> > Oh great. One of UNIX's worst abortions, taken to extremes (can you >> > say "ioctl() is a bogus ``API'' for controlling behavior?" I thought >> > so).. >> >> Plan 9 doesn't have IOCTL at all. Just about everything is done with open, >> close, read, and write. > >So how do you do "out of band" operations, like telling a tape >drive to skip forward to the next mark? > > Jordan > I haven't read Plan9, but it sounds like another "great idea" by some folks with a serious tunnelvision problem from what's been said here. Although I suspect that there is something like STREAMS' getmsg() and putmsg() for custom functions, which is better than nothing at all, but a major pain in the a*s and completely non-portable to non-STREAMS environments. In System V we convert STREAMS messages to ioctls...so maybe that tells you something. no_ioctls == no_features == mediocre_product. db