instability in Berkeley versus AT&T releases

[Guy Harris]

> They didn't appear to have attempted to convert the TTY driver. VMIN and
> VTIME should never have been part of c_cc[] in the first place, so if they
> had converted it and made them seperate somewhere I'd hardly call it a
> botch.

If their system claims to be S3/S5 compatible, but doesn't permit you to set
VMIN and VTIME and get the *documented* behavior, it's broken.  Period.

On the other hand, reading between the lines of what you're saying, it seems
you were able to take a V7 program on some S3 port and compile and run it,
*still using the V7 ioctls*.  Fine.  Lots of systems do that.  However, this
does not mean you "don't have to fiddle with MIN and TIME" or whatever you
said.  If you did TCGETA, turned off ICANON *but* didn't change MIN or TIME,
and did TCSETA, either your program would get surprising results or it's
running on a broken system.  You didn't make it clear in your original
comments that this is what you'd done.

The fact that you tried doing the same "compile and go without changes" on
somebody else's S5 system, where the UNIX/TS compatibility had *not* been
replaced with V7 compatibility, says nothing about S3, S5, V7, or their
relative compatibility.  It says something about the vendors' documentation
(they should have told people about the new tty driver) and about your
willingness to read documentation (you yourself admitted that you hadn't
*read* the documentation until recently).

> Peter da Silva (wondering why he's still flaming me over VMIN and VTIME).

Because it's *very* tiresome reading somebody making the same incorrect
statement over and over again.  It's unfortunate that the vendor's
documentation, or somebody, didn't make the tty driver differences clear,
and that it wasn't made clear that S3 and S5 don't normally have a
V7-compatibility mode.  However, the fact remains that 1) the drivers do
require you to do things differently, in general, 2) some systems support V7
compatibility, but not all, and 3) just because a V7 program worked on an S3
system which was modified to support V7 ioctls does NOT mean that if the
program doesn't work on an S5 system not so modified that a) S3 and S5 or
incompatible, b) you don't have to worry about MIN and TIME if you use the
S3/S5 ioctls or c) that the S5 which doesn't support the V7 ioctls is
"broken".  It's fairly clear that you don't have a thorough understanding of
the differences between the TTY drivers.  Could you please find a discussion
where you have something to contribute other than content-free flames?

	Guy Harris