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From: cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: POSIX bashing
Summary: Why do I get the feeling rbj's article was a belated April Fool post?
Message-ID: <72242@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 16 Apr 91 04:58:01 GMT
References: <3446@unisoft.UUCP> <3478@unisoft.UUCP> <1991Apr14.094953.12840@thunder.mcrcim.mcgill.edu> <129131@uunet.UU.NET>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: cgy@cs.brown.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
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In article <129131@uunet.UU.NET> rbj@uunet.UU.NET (Root Boy Jim) writes:
>
>I think the real challenge is to put readline and termcap into the kernel.

Kernel?  You mean the "watermelon," right?

As someone has already pointed out, the cost of context switching to handle
character I/O is negligible on most new systems.  Why bloat the kernel any
more?  Why not put it in a shlib and let the apps use it?

>If the kernel did enuf editing, the shell could run in cooked mode and still
>be usable.

This is a wild goose chase, in my opinion.  Applications will continually
want more kernel editing, and cooked mode will become less and less of a
useful feature and more and more of an ugly backward-compatibility hack.
Eventually, you're right back where you started, with everyone using
raw/cbreak mode; except that the kernel is now twice as big.  This is how
Unix got the way it is.

Curtis