[6284] in Release_7.7_team
Re: "term" and "xresize"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Fri Mar 13 09:20:37 2009
Cc: debathena@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
Message-Id: <57D420CB-B9F5-4006-8588-988966DB5886@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.DEB.1.10.0903130001320.22031@vinegar-pot.mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:19:36 -0400
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term was definitely more useful than fiddling around with tset and
$TERM back in the days when dialing in was more widespread. I vaguely
recall us documenting this in the old Dialing into Athena document. I
would say that we can safely kill this, since most users ssh'ing have
something that deals with terminal emulation correctly (except, for
some reason, xterm on OS X for me).
xresize appears to be just a wrapper around resize (which, according
to the man page, Athena wrote in the first place) that temporarily
turns off shell globbing before running it. I think we can probably
kill this too, since modern terminals (e.g. gnome-terminal) seem to
resize intelligently. On the other hand, I have this vague
recollection that people may have used this alias inside their own
aliases after calling curses-based programs (ie: after/before running
"more", you call "xresize"), and that might break, I don't know. I do
see comments ca. 1999 in drafts of documentation along the lines of
"What does this do/why do we need it?".
Anyway, I personally am not opposed to removing these, but I'd like to
wait and see if someone who has been around longer than me can give a
more definitive answer about whether or not they're still useful.
-Jon
On Mar 13, 2009, at 12:06 AM, Tim Abbott wrote:
> By the way, why do the "term" and "xresize" aliases exist? I'm asking
> mostly because it strikes me that I can't recall ever seeing anyone
> use
> them...
>
> If they no longer serve a purpose, it might be worth removing them
> while
> we're touching the dotfiles.
>
> -Tim Abbott
>
>
>
