[BusyBox] [PATCH] New comm applet

[Rob Landley]

On Tuesday 05 April 2005 05:58 pm, Rainer Weikusat wrote:

> > You know, combined with your previous sentence about a lack of supporting 
> > arguments, I'm really starting to suspect you're trolling.
>
> This is not an uncommon thing to do for people who are facing
> "difficulties" when propagating their politics as technical facts.

I'm talking about what's recommended in busybox.  You're talking about 
something other than busybox on the busybox list, and talking about other 
people pushing a political agenda.

Hands up everybody who spots the irony.

> FreeBSD, actually, but this doesn't really matter:

So we agree on something.

> Just because newer text terminals (which are still sold)

So are vacuum tubes, gas lights, and buggy whips.  Heck, my sister went to a 
ren faire and bought a sword from a blacksmith for my birthday a few years 
ago.  I still have it.  I'm not suggsting porting busybox to it, nor am I 
recommending the more realistic goal of porting busybox to the Z80 processor 
(which is still zilog's core product last I checked, and still sells quite 
well to control traffic lights and elevators and such).

You continue to say things, yet not make an actual point...

> are probably all ANSI compliant, 
> older ones, which are certainly still in use, insofar they still work,
> may not.

And the software that's on them is as old as they are.  My topic is what's a 
good idea when writing new software in the modern era.  I'm not sure about 
yours.

Heck, the version of anaconda in Red Hat 6.0 was compeletly unusable on a 
black and white monitor because the text and backgrounds were different 
colors but the same brightness.  They shipped like that.  I have no idea if 
they've fixed it since, because I threw that monitor away five years ago.

> To not support non-ANSI terminals because the increase in 
> code size is considered to be not worth it, given the benefit to a
> supposedly very small user base only is valid point.

We are still on the busybox mailing list, correct?  So at best, your entire 
argument is irrelevant?

> To claim that  'very  small' is the same as 'nobody' isn't. 

I'm saying the demographic, if any, is a rounding error that may safely be 
ignored, along the lines of saying "nobody wears polyester leisure suits and 
listens to disco anymore".  There are exceptions to anything, but there's a 
line between being accurate and being pedantic.  Your observation is not 
USEFUL.

In any design issue you have to figure out where adding features to pander to 
the remaining fraction of the marketplace is simply bloat.  Busybox has a 
fairly high threshold here, and in this case an ANSI solution will literally 
satisfy 99.99% of all the users (and potential users) out there, up to and 
including the text to speech crowd who can safely ignore it.  (Support for 
UTF-8 is a much much much bigger real-world issue than attempting to shoehorn 
new software onto 1970's hardware, and how much effort has gone into 
supporting that in busybox so far?)

Rob