COMPAT_43 tty processing ?

[Tim Robbins]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 02:24:10PM +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> 
> Do we need the COMPAT_43 tty processing in 5-STABLE ?

I assume you mean that you want to remove the option entirely, not just
take it out of GENERIC.

Whether we need it or not depends what we're willing to break: most
screen-oriented programs in early releases of FreeBSD used it, either by
linking with libcurses, issuing the ioctls directly, or by calling the
widely-used ttyname() function.

I think removing the compatibility tty ioctls would make COMPAT_43 incomplete
and largely worthless; either we support running FreeBSD 1.x/2.x binaries or
we don't. On one hand, I would like to see the mostly-unused code removed
to facilitate whatever tty work you're doing, but on the other hand, I see
the ability to run old binaries as one of the things that sets us apart from
Linux.


Tim