Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 28 Jul 1995 16:48:37 -0400
From:      dennis@et.htp.com (dennis)
To:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: your mail 
Message-ID:  <199507282048.QAA20909@mail.htp.com>

next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
>> > > 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




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199507282048.QAA20909>