* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2010-11-29 00:05]: > On 2010-11-28, at 15:35, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: > > It is not a bug. It is the place we have arrived after years > > of walking down the path that followed the wrong direction > > chosen from the start. I am not complaining about the hack > > itself. > > What wrong direction was chosen in 1969?
Leaving terminal support entirely up to userspace, via libraries? So now there are several of those, with different conventions for how to configure each, and each needs to be configured for each terminal, leaving room for things to not line up correctly. Some things involve environment variables which makes it awkward to get the right settings into the right place consistently, esp. without restarting long-running programs like X. You get fun times if you do things such as start a program under an rxvt-unicode terminal and reattach it under a putty-256color one. You can work around most of those using GNU screen or something alike -- creating room for more software, and thus more hate. And on and on. The only worse clusterfuck that comes to mind from own experience was printing under DOS. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
