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Date:      Tue, 29 Dec 1998 11:14:21 +0100 (MET)
From:      j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
To:        freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: wanton Atticizing is bad
Message-ID:  <199812291014.LAA26748@uriah.heep.sax.de>
References:  <13960.20551.6406.312531@katiska.clinet.fi> <199812290358.TAA15263@dingo.cdrom.com>

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Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au> wrote:

(pcvt)

>> This still does not answer the issue.  Why it has to be removed ?
> 
> The author has abandoned it, and nobody else serious has stepped 
> forward to maintain it.

Sorry, but that's completely untrue.  The author has never abandoned
it.  Just the opposite, since the author joined the committer's crew a
few days ago, he even offered to maintain it himself now for the time
being.  I've been in charge of maintenance until now, and pending one
still unanswered mostly cosmetic fix submitted by Bruce, and pending
an overdue unifdef sweep, you can follow the commitlogs and see that
pcvt actually _is_ maintained.  However, the last known (to me, at
least) bugs have already been fixed somewhere in 1996.  It's just that
it has a stable feature set, but that shouldn't be confused with total
lack of maintenance.

Sure, the days of pcvt are counted.  But more about this can be read
in another thread.

> We need to have a single console driver, and syscons is it.

While it will probably keep the name `syscons', it can't and won't be
the current syscons (*).  Again, see another thread in this
mailinglist.

(*) I have mentioned it more than once that the design of the current
syscons cannot house a decent VT220 emulation, since 256 characters
are way too few for this.  What pcvt did is trading colors (only 8
instead of 16) for character cells (512 instead of 256).  This
suffices mostly, albeit i think it's still not enough for something
like supporting Cyrillic charactersets simultaneously with ISO8859-1.
The latter probably requires to keep the graphics card in graphics
mode all the time.  That's a little slower, but given the today's
graphics cards probably doable (unlike 6 years ago).

Hopefully the new console driver that's currently in its design stage
might allow for all this.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)

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