terminology poll: what would you call the part of the operating system that is responsible for managing the pseudoterminal device? (handling ioctls, tracking the foreground process, remembering the terminal window size, turning `Ctrl+C` into a SIGTERM, handling `Ctrl+S` and `Ctrl+W`, etc)
(also open to hearing that you think that it's not just one thing or anything else really)
@b0rk
> line discipline
I don't know what term I would use for it.
I do know that “line discipline” strongly sounds like a *protocol* (like UTF-8 or SMTP), not a part of an operating system. If someone pointed to a software subsystem and said “that's the line discipline”, that would just confuse; it sounds like saying
“that's the handshake” and sounds like they bungled the sentence.
For a software subsystem *implementing* “line discipline”, I'd demand a better term.
@b0rk
I think they were planning to have multiple line disciplines to choose from. I vaguely recall something about an "old ldisc" vs. "new ldisc". If you use a serial port for PPP it would use the "ppp ldisc".
To be explicit, the line discipline is the code that decides what to do with the incoming characters, such as ^U and ^C. And which ones to send. The tty driver actually sends and receives them from the serial port.
@bignose
Julia Evans
bignose
Rhialto