to job control or not to job control (was UNIX Futures)

[Wayne A. Christopher]

In article <6571 at utzoo.UUCP>, henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
> > Since when does EVERY program have to redraw the screen?  I stop and start
> > compiles, makes, news-readers, mail, etc. and none of them do screen 
> > refreshes.
> 
> And therefore you lose their screen output when you restart them.  This is
> a bug, not a feature.  Agreed that sometimes redrawing the output would
> incur unneeded overhead when you don't particularly care about the output,
> but this is like saying that SVR0 doesn't incur the overhead involved in
> providing virtual memory -- yes, it's cheaper, but at the cost of not
> providing a valuable and important capability.

First, if the program isn't prepared to redisplay output anyway, no matter
whether or not you have job control it's going to scroll off the screen
anyway.  You don't gain much... Second, sometimes I will run a program, stop
it, cat a file, and then restart the first program and copy information from
the file I just catted.  Having the program redisplay the screen wouldn't
be quite the correct thing...

> > Further, I think window systems are just fine, but they require VERY special
> > hardware to give acceptable performance.
> 
> I know people who would dispute this.  That aside, though, cheap plastic
> imitations are usually cheaper than the real thing.  You get what you pay for.

That's not a convincing argument to people who can't afford suns...

> 				Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
> 				{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry

What are you arguing for? You say that BSD job control is a Bad Thing, and
that it is inferior to a window system.  Sure, I'd take a workstation without
job control over a terminal with job control, but so what?  Are you
saying that the UNIXes that run on windowing displays should have
job control taken out, because it is inelegant and un-UNIXish?  Or
are you just making fun of people who don't have suns?  So far your
arguments don't seem to have convinced many people...

	Wayne