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Getting a new tty pot

Getting a new tty pot

Posted Jul 30, 2009 12:50 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Getting a new tty pot by iq-0
Parent article: A tempest in a tty pot

I've seen that same buggy behavior of emacs losing the tail ends of compilations on various versions of OSX. I think it's fixed now, I have no idea if it was fixed in the kernel or in emacs, and I don't know if it's the same underlying cause or not...but it seems suspicious.

So the claim that this new version of Linux is fundamentally breaking the Unix ABI and that emacs worked fine with all other OSes is not all at obvious!


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Getting a new tty pot

Posted Aug 2, 2009 11:10 UTC (Sun) by iq-0 (subscriber, #36655) [Link]

True, but it is not obvious that it's the other way round either. My point was merely that in these
cases (where we have a cross platform application) it's safer to assume the kernel is at fault until
proven otherwise. Which in these more obscure interactions between programs and kernels
probably means doing some research on what other systems do.
I'm not saying that always following the lead of other is better, but a standard is defined by it's
implementations and if all implementations make more or less the same (possibly) wrong
assumptions, those wrong assumptions arguably are the standard.
Even this doesn't mean we shouldn't deviate from that standard but doing so (breaking lines with
this implicit standard) probably does effectively constitute as a ABI change.

But it all comes down to wether it is more reasonable to play the "guilty until proven innocent"
versus the "innocent until proven guilty" card in these cases. Both (logically) in the end lead to the
same conclusion (if the problem is deterministic of course).

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