4 ms·
It's a combination of factors: * The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU proj
by JdeBP 1y ago
It's a combination of factors:
* The original author of the project has not been involved in it since 1990. The people who took it over and made it a GNU project then largely stopped working on it in 2004. The people who are now working on it are something like its 3rd or 4th wave of developers.
* Learning the internals of screen now from scratch is a lot harder than when I did it in 1987. There's an awful lot more operating system historical and portability factors, now. In 1987, it was works-on-4.3BSD-might-not-on-your-Unix.
* If you deal with pseudo-terminals cross-platform, there are still huge variations on how pseudo-terminals work and how the long-standing security issues of pseudo-terminals, identified in the 1990s, have been addressed in operating systems.
* screen is encumbered by a lot of 1980s Think. It still today diligently manages, and puts quite a lot of effort into constructing, a generated-on-the-fly TERMCAP environment variable, for example.
* Attitudes to security have changed. At least one security hole in the headlined report was actually a neat-o feature of terminals in Unix in the 1970s and 1980s.
- okbitbuddy 1y ago[flagged]
- JdeBP 1y agoPort something like this to OpenBSD and then say that this sort of thing is not hard work. (-: It's very hard work, especially nowadays. The sweet spot was probably in the 1990s, when novices were still likely to know that prime sources of knowledge about this stuff were posts on Usenet, or shell archives of text files written by Daniel J. Bernstein. https://jdebp.uk/FGA/bernstein-on-ttys/ https://jdebp.uk/FGA/bernstein-on-ttys/ I speak from experience of being someone who did my own tweaks to screen in the 1980s, and who has written other similar programs from scratch.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- okbitbuddy 1y ago[flagged]
- masfuerte 1y agoCheers, that's interesting. There are a few instances of ([]) which look like broken links in: https://jdebp.uk/FGA/bernstein-on-ttys/cttys.html https://jdebp.uk/FGA/bernstein-on-ttys/cttys.html Tbf, they are probably all dead now anyway.
- JdeBP 1y agoIf I recall correctly (I transcribed that years ago.) they were lost in the original. They wouldn't have been links. It was written in 1991.
- cedilla 1y agoWhat's your point besides whining about the general state of "delevopers", whoever that is? Are you volunteering to take over maintenance of GNU Screen? Really, the gall to complain about "laziness" when all you're doing is spreading negativity on a forum.
- okbitbuddy 1y ago[flagged]
- okbitbuddy 1y ago[flagged]