Accusing Bell of NIH (formerly Re: useless digest reference)

[Stanley Friesen]

In article <277 at kitty.UUCP> peter at kitty.UUCP (Peter DaSilva) writes:
>
>> (3) The USG TTY driver is a clean, orthogonal design that is easy to get to
>> do what you want.  You've never seen a posting of "how do I get an 8-bit
>> data path with ^S/^Q flow control" (needed for many laser printers) for USG
>> because it's so easy.  Sometimes you have to bite the bullet for the future.
>
>Now that I've found the well-hidden documentation on the USG driver I have to
>agree it's orthogonal. Overloading EOF and QUIT as MIN and TIME was a bad
>mistake, since it makes the intuitive transform between V7 and relatives and
>SIII and relatives a total loss... and adds extra stuff you have to save
>and restore when changing modes.
>
	Is this why the default values for MIN and TIME are not a sane
1 and 0 like they should be!?!? Really, while orthoganality and
flexibility are fine goals, so is *simplicity* of *use*. From what I
have seen the Sys3/5 ioctl system is a real pain to use correctly.
In breking out the various operations the designers seem to have
forgotten the principle of leaving the most common operations *simple*,
that is such frequent transitions as turning CR mode on or off, or
going to single character input should be *atomic* operations. The
only really simple improvement was the OPOST idea, which Berkeley has
implimented as LLITOUT! Maybe I should get the ioctl system I designed
few years ago and post an outline of it to the net!(It is of course
unimplemented).
	Gee, what a choice, the inflxibility of V7 ioctl or the
overweaning complexity of Sys3/5 ioctl! Someone *please* implement
a rational system.
-- 

				Sarima (Stanley Friesen)

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