On Apr 17, 2014, at 7:56 PM, William Yodlowsky <william@OpenBSD.ORG> wrote:
After the failed discussion here on nmh-workers about utmp support, in which we attempted to resurrect it with this tiny patch: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2013-01/msg00018.html ...we had to add that patch to our ports tree to keep rcvtty working on OpenBSD. OK fine.
We (the core nmh developers) really want to keep the code base as strictly aligned to POSIX as we can. (Within reason.) We made a deliberate effort to remove as much of the OS-specific code as we could. The goal is to have the nmh code be as portable as we can make it. I.e. we want the distribution to build "out of the box" on anything that implements core POSIX (well, SUSv2 I guess). That means using a conservative set of APIs, even within the 'mandatory' POSIX/SUSv2 set. When it comes to entities building packages for their own distributions, most will want to customize the build in some way. E.g. pretty much everyone changes the default paths to something that matches their distribution's filesystem layout. But others like to fiddle with the code to take advantage of OS-specific APIs. This is not uncommon in all the BSDs, and their ports build systems provides hooks to make this easy (the files/ sub-directory on FreeBSD, e.g.). So, in this case, you should be taking advantage of your own ports environment to customize the build in a way that delivers a set of binaries that matches your user's expectations. And you are – by far – in a better position to make those sorts of decisions for your user base than we could ever be. But stepping back for a minute, look where this goes. We customize for Open. Now the Free folks say "Hey! Wait a minute?! Incorporate our customizations, too!" Then along come the several dozen Linux distributions ... Oh, don't forget all the Solaris derivatives. This just puts us back to where we were 10 years ago. I understand why you would like the patch applied. I am a build engineer in my $DAYJOB, and in a previous life had the unenviable task of writing the glue to generate native packages for over a dozen UNIX variants (not Linux distributions – I'm talking native packages for AIX, HP/UX, Solaris, BSD/OS, Irix, Linux RPMs, whatever Digital was calling their UNIX in the late 90s, and a couple of others I now forget). So I feel your pain. However: it is *your* pain. As the port maintainer, it is *your* job to do those customizations, to turn the generic code into something that *your* user base will love you for :-) The code in rcvtty is unlikely to change in any non-trivial manner in the next ... decade? This is a 'set once and forget' operation. And I would be happy to put a notice into the source code at the utmpx bits to warn future developers that some folks still customize their builds to use utmp, therefore please don't frotz the code without very good reason. --lyndon
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