What kinds of things would you want in the GNU OS?

[Steve Harris]

In article <1549 at salgado.Solbourne.COM> dworkin at Solbourne.com (Dieter Muller) writes:
>I'd *really* like a sane tty driver.

Hear hear!!  At a former job we talked a lot about how we would rewrite
the tty driver.  One idea was to give the user, via ioctl's, access to
the uart (or whatever serial-line multiplexer you have).  One ioctl to
get the uart settings (in a bit vector), another to set them, and
another to have the driver(??) send you a signal (for which you would
have to write the appropriate handler) whenever any of the bits changed
(e.g., DTR was deasserted).  Standard configurations (handlers) would
be privided in a library.  Of course, one would be limited by the
capabilities of the uart, but the design would assume total access to
be possible.

A second idea is "copy-on-write symbolic links" -- I have a symlink:
	bar -> foo
When I write to it, a regular file "bar" is created (the symlink is
destroyed), the contents of foo (up to the current file-pointer-offset)
are copied to bar, and the write takes place.  I'm not sure what
happens if foo is not a regular file.
-- 
Steve Harris -- Eaton Corp. -- Beverly, MA -- uunet!etnibsd!vsh