Re: [RFC PATCH] Replacing "master-slave" terminology for pseudoterminals

From: enh <enh@google.com>
To: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Cc: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>,
	"libc-alpha@sourceware.org" <libc-alpha@sourceware.org>,
	linux-man <linux-man@vger.kernel.org>,
	Zack Weinberg <zackw@panix.com>,
	Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com>,
	Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>,
	Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>,
	Linux API <linux-api@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH] Replacing "master-slave" terminology for pseudoterminals
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 10:25:05 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAJgzZoqFvn649xG5XSNBmUutgGQ8b16ELhVsdf0XD0QwFrRtZw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <c756202e-7af8-c1b4-e99f-d77f3eae8c09@gmail.com>

On Fri, Jul 31, 2020 at 12:48 AM Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)
<mtk.manpages@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Elliot,
>
> On 7/30/20 10:35 PM, enh wrote:
> > On Thu, Jul 30, 2020 at 4:38 AM Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On 7/30/20 5:16 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
> >>> I know what you mean. One reason for that verbosity is the need to
> >>> clearly distinguish "pseudoterminal device/end" from "pseudoterminal
> >>> device pair". It's hard to avoid being wordy there.
> >>
> >> The perfect is the enemy of the good. My feeling is that as others
> >> write this text in emails or discussions, we'll eventually all settle
> >> on some other short form we find agreeable and then later we can adjust
> >> the man pages to use that.
> >
> > based on my own brief experience, i'm expecting that _code_ will
> > settle on pty and tty. but if you're reading the man pages to
> > understand the concepts -- which are inherently quite confusing -- i
> > think spelling things out in longhand might remain useful in that
> > context.
> >
> >> Until then taking the lead to change this
> >> language is the correct way forward.
> >
> > yeah, definitely.
> >
> > i'd prefer for michael to go first -- since the bionic documentation
> > is basically just a link to man7.org, and even without that he's the
> > canonical source -- but i'm happy to go first and submit my change
> > first if it helps us make progress :-)
>
> I'd prefer to take this a little slowly. I don't plan to merge the
> changes just yet. I'm interested to get a bit more feedback first,
> including from Zack. (I'm guessing Zack is on holiday or so, which
> is why we've not heard from him.) Also, if we have rough consensus
> on this change, I would like to raise it with the POSIX folk; it
> would of course be great if there was a corresponding change in the
> standard, so that we all (all UNIX) have a common set of reference
> terms.

the good news is that it came up at this week's austin group meeting...

the bad news is that (afaik) none of us were there.

i had been planning to suggest we try to join next week anyway, to
avoid having this stall again.

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