Re: [Axiom-developer] Hypertex and pty

[Waldek Hebisch]

Vanuxem Grégory wrote:
> Le jeudi 26 octobre 2006 ? 02:36 +0200, Waldek Hebisch a écrit :
> > I wanted to try hypertex in silver on Gentoo Linux.  It turned out
> > that I can not start sman, becouse 'ptyopen' was failing.  Atfter
> > a little investigation I found out that the machine (which otherwise
> > uses bleeding edge new software) has only old legacy pty's -- the
> > new '/dev/ptmx' and '/dev/pts' were not enabled.  All other
> > software worked fine, trying '/dev/ptmx' first and then silently
> > falling back to legacy pty's -- only Axiom assumed that Linux
> > must have working '/dev/ptmx'.
> > 
> > While I consider this machine as misconfigured, the problem may
> > appear in real use.  If we want Axiom to "just work" it should
> > also try new method first and then fall back to legacy pty's.
> > 
> 
> See http://wiki.axiom-developer.org/189GraphicsDoesNotWorkOnDebian
> 

I see, I am not the first with this problem.  Concerning the patch:
while technically it seem to work (I tested a slight variation of it),
it has many problems:

1) the patch duplicates code (my variation avoids duplication)
2) on Linux there is 'openpty' library function which is smart
   enough to try first '/dev/ptmx' and if needed fall back to
   legacy pty's. 'openpty' also handles extra issues (like 
   changing access rights to legacy pty's) -- we probably should
   use it.
3) in general 'openpty.c.pamphlet' is messy and the patch from
   wiki only adds to this mess

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden