Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: New (GNU) kernels--what I think
Keywords: UNIX progress; controversy
Message-ID: <1724@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 31 May 89 19:48:31 GMT
References: <2501@gandalf.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 28

>  It ought to be trivial, for example, to discover who has what files
>  open (by name);  UNIX currently provides no such facility (or an only
>  partially functional facility).

What do you mean "by name"?  Does "name" mean the name of the open file,
or the name of the "who" (which means a process) that has the file open?
The former isn't quite as easy as you seem to think....

>  Whatever mods are required to support any of the above-mentioned stuff.
>  Restrict filenames to alphabetics,numbers,and punctuation, keeping in
>  mind national character sets.  The basic notion is that it ought to be
>  impossible to create a filename you can't trivially remove/display.

I hope "punctuation" includes blanks; maybe the UNIX shells make it
inconvenient to remove such files (but not *too* hard), but not
everybody necessarily uses them.

Furthermore, some "national character sets" include characters that are
neither alphabetics, numbers, nor punctuation (can you say "Kanji"?).

>  The tty-driver needs the following characters (configurable, of
>  course):

I'd just trash most of the "user interface" features of the tty driver
completely, and have people run their choice of user-mode front ends
instead; cf. EMACS windows, the "ile" editor or whatever, etc..  This
means you don't have to teach the "tty driver" about history, or line
editing, or termcap/terminfo, or....