Pseudoterminal terminology (was Re: Rename "master" branch to "main"?)

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

On 7/27/20 10:52 PM, enh wrote:

[...]

> yeah, i'm can't say i'm particularly excited about those terms ... but
> "master" and "slave" weren't super obvious either.
> 
> tbh, i don't think any of the choices in this thread are actually _worse_
> in terms of clarity (though existing practice was at least consistent so
> you could rtfm).
> 
> i found the python reference i failed to find for michael earlier... it
> looks like i couldn't find it because it's the one master/slave change to
> python that they didn't actually submit. in
> https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/9100 they were going to go with
> parent and child but gvanrossum said they shouldn't change unless Unix
> changes.
> 
> at least parent/child are names that most folks (including non-native
> speakers) will have had to learn already.

Those names (parent, child) do seem strange to me. With process
creation, those terms make a kind of sense. There's no obvious sense
to me for parent/child in the pty context. (The nearest I can see: The
parent device tells the child device what to do? Now that's a whole 
other interesting can of worms.)

> golang went with pty/tty (
> https://github.com/creack/pty/commit/7dc38fb350b1d71383eed149e73acb7bae231ddb)
> which is interestingly simple.

The simplicity of it is appealing. But, how does this read in
prose documentation. Do we replace actual English words with 
abbreviations ("pty", "tty")? That looks a little weird in writing, 
and seems weirder when spoken aloud. And then: "the pseudoterminal
pty device" seems a little bit like something I might find in
"The Department of Redundancy Dept"...

I think proper English nouns would be preferable, if we can find
ones that are suitable.

Cheers,

Michael


-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/