Contents

Things I learned while writing ah-tty

Thing I've larned from working on ah-tty

  1. Setting up a new session or tty is a very odd, poorly documented, and partly unportable tasked. This is a weakness in UNIX
  2. The GNU libc has a great deal of information on the tty and how to set them up. But that information isn't neccessarily portable (what if there is no glibc?)
  3. VT100 emulators are stuck with some non-deterministic parts, and the protocol is kinda hard to find good documentation on.
  4. VT100 is kinda like an RPC mechanism
  5. VT100 there are too many ways to do the same thing in VT100, the ones that aren't any more efficient shouldn't have been created.
  6. If you create a set of relative cursor motion schemes, you should never create a cursor addressing scheme that is absolute or relative depending on some mode flag. Just make it absolute.
  7. Not all termios, terminfo, termcap or curses implemenations are the same.
  8. There are many ok sources of information on the net
  9. VT100 specs are seldom followed (and heavily extended)
  10. Termcap and terminfo are usually the more definitive source of terminal emulation information
  11. My $TERM variable is not honored very much.
  12. `screen' is a great program, but not the answer to everything; plus it has lots of LISP like stuff. But it is truly great.
  13. Bash's screen managementt has a few bugs of its own (especially near the bottom of the display)
  14. I don't like CVS. It requires a lot of man-power for simple things.
  15. Trouble-tickets, or problem reporting software can allows techies to close problems too quickly. Sometimes before the problem is solved, and confirmed by the person needing help.
  16. A problem is solved only when the solution meets the acceptance criteria
  17. Tech support people are overworked and get stuck dealing with a lot of cranky folks. Okay, we all knew that. Hug a techie today.


Author: Randall Maastop