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([2001:a61:241a:1101:8c63:f991:aa91:da82]) by smtp.googlemail.com with ESMTPSA id t189sm4072947wmf.47.2020.08.05.13.35.00 (version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_128_GCM_SHA256 bits=128/128); Wed, 05 Aug 2020 13:35:00 -0700 (PDT) Reply-To: mtk.manpages@gmail.com Cc: mtk.manpages@gmail.com, austin-group-l , "libc-alpha@sourceware.org" , linux-man , Florian Weimer , Carlos O'Donell , enh , Joseph Myers , Paul Eggert , Zack Weinberg Subject: Re: Pseudoterminal terminology in POSIX To: Paul Smith , Donn Terry , Geoff Clare References: <20200805135110.6Sj7F%steffen@sdaoden.eu> <20200805142049.GA17848@localhost> <1d8c5e6e96fbdd47ce143a566b57db2c803d4898.camel@gnu.org> From: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" Message-ID: Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2020 22:34:59 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/68.10.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <1d8c5e6e96fbdd47ce143a566b57db2c803d4898.camel@gnu.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-man-owner@vger.kernel.org Precedence: bulk List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-man@vger.kernel.org [again restoring the CC] On 8/5/20 5:28 PM, Paul Smith via austin-group-l at The Open Group wrote: > On Wed, 2020-08-05 at 08:00 -0700, Donn Terry via austin-group-l at The > Open Group wrote: >> The suggestions here so far are cumbersome and tend to be ambiguous. >> The old m-word and sl-word, and also "client" and "server" could >> potentially be interpreted backwards from the conventional intent. >> (You can think about it as the sl-word/client actually being in >> control: telling the m-word/server what it's supposed to be doing, >> e.g. "execute this command line".) >> >> How about "provider" and "consumer"? "Pseudoterminal provider" and >> "...consumer" seem (at least to me) to be unambiguous in terms of the >> reversal above, (reasonably) clear in meaning, and politically >> neutral. Have the other discussions not shown here considered this? > > To me even "provider" / "consumer" still has this issue: do you > consider the pseudoterminal as providing to the terminal, or the > terminal as providing to the pseudoterminal. Both seem legitimate > enough interpretations to create confusion. That was my immediate thought also, unfortunately. That said, again, I think if we settle on a terminology (even provider/consumer), people will adapt. (But, i still prefer pseudoterminal/terminal or ancillary/primary). > To remove ambiguity perhaps we need to think about the attributes that > are unique to each element of the pair and use that in the term, for > example "backend" / "frontend". > > This would have to be introduced, something like "a pseudoterminal > device pair consists of a backend terminal device and a frontend > pseudoterminal device". Yes. The terminology, whatever it is, needs to be introduced and defined. That alone will remove a lot of ambiguity, regardless of the terms that are settled on. Thanks, Michael