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

[enh]

On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 12:16 PM Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) <
mtk.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/28/20 5:32 PM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> > * Michael Kerrisk:
> >
> >> Those names (parent, child) do seem strange to me. With process
> >> creation, those terms make a kind of sense.
> >
> > Not really: it's rare that a subprocess does not exit before the process
> > that launched it.
> >
> >> 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"...
> >
> > Maybe we can use “pseudoterminal device” and “terminal device”?
>
> So, the proposed terminology would be:
>
> * pseudoterminal device pair
> * pseudoterminal device (formerly: master)
> * terminal device (formerly: slave)
>
> ?
>
> It's an interesting idea. I like the concept, but I'd want to
> see how it looks in rewritten manual pages. I'll take a look.
>

yeah, that will be interesting to see. in the meantime, on the source
side...

trying pty and tty on for size, and rewriting the implementation and tests
just to see how awful it looked... it turns out that the new names work out
really nicely. in particular, you end up passing pty to functions like
grantpt() or ptsname() with a 'p' in the name, and tty to functions like
tcsetattr() and ttyname() that just have 't's.

(https://android-review.googlesource.com/c/platform/bionic/+/1374048 if you
want to see the diffs.)


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