[6285] in Release_7.7_team
Re: "term" and "xresize"
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Ken Raeburn)
Fri Mar 13 12:06:40 2009
From: Ken Raeburn <raeburn@MIT.EDU>
To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
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Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2009 12:05:40 -0400
Cc: Tim Abbott <tabbott@mit.edu>, debathena@mit.edu, release-team@mit.edu
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On Mar 13, 2009, at 09:19, Jonathan Reed wrote:
> 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?".
Back in the mists of time, when the X Window System was young, and X11
but a gleam in Bob Scheifler's eye, tty settings did not include the
"size" info; programs needing to know the size of an xterm window had
to look at environment variables. The shell didn't even know how to
update them, in the beginning, so this alias was needed to run a
program and tell the shell to update its environment. (The "eval" in
the alias is a critical part of it, not just the fact that "resize" is
invoked.) I think there may also have been issues with protocols like
rlogin not transmitting window size changes in those days, so even
after the data was in the kernel, it could still be wrong.
I don't know of any system where it's still needed, offhand. Maybe if
people somewhere still do dial up, and get a pty session rather than a
ppp session...
Ken
