From owner-freebsd-chat Sun Jun 15 20:12:31 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id UAA12622 for chat-outgoing; Sun, 15 Jun 1997 20:12:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu (we-refuse-to-spy-on-our-users@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu [128.52.46.64]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA12613 for ; Sun, 15 Jun 1997 20:12:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: by ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu (8.8.5/8.6.12GNU) id XAA16026; Sun, 15 Jun 1997 23:12:03 -0400 Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 23:12:03 -0400 Message-Id: <199706160312.XAA16026@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> From: "Joel N. Weber II" To: ac199@hwcn.org CC: jkh@time.cdrom.com, hasty@rah.star-gate.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: (message from Tim Vanderhoek on Sun, 15 Jun 1997 22:20:15 -0400 (EDT)) Subject: Re: Plugin? (Re: Complaining at Warner Brothers? ) x-url: http://www.red-bean.com/~nemo x-attribution: nemo x-foobar: To err is human. To blame someone else for your errors is even more human. Sender: owner-chat@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 22:20:15 -0400 (EDT) From: Tim Vanderhoek Reply-To: ac199@hwcn.org Heh. Kernel compiles may be fun, but are they really so fun that you would want to recompile your kernel everytime you changed one of your shell scripts? :) Didn't think so. :) No. I wouldn't want to recompile the kernel to change a shell script. OTOH, a lot of the things I actually might want to change in my kernel can't be changed by just adding a new loadable module. I wrote an ugly hack on Thursday that allows me to hit alt-leftarrow, and after that, all of my keystrokes on my console appear to have come from the terminal on teh serial port rather than the console. I hit alt-leftarrow to switch back. The complete diffs for the Linux kernel are under a hundred lines. Admittedly, you can't use anything other than ttyS3 for your dumb terminal, and there is a minor problem that the kernel can't recongize alt-leftarrow when I'm in X, but other than that it works fine. The Linux kernel also happens to support loadable modules, but I don't know how to write a loadable module which does this. And I think the same situation exists with plugins for web browsers. Can people show me three examples of actual plugins for which the source is distributed? Plugins which I would actually want to use? Until then, I don't see any substantial benefit that the free (as in freedom) software community will get from me supporting plugins.