Question about init and controlling TTY

[Rob Landley]

On Saturday 08 April 2006 7:23 pm, Devin Bayer wrote:
> On Apr 8, 2006, at 12:55, Rob Landley wrote:
> > On Friday 07 April 2006 11:00 pm, Devin Bayer wrote:
> >> It should still be changed.  It's currently not possible to have a
> >> setup that would be normal for the sysvinit package.
> >
> > You mean like supporting runlevels?
>
> I don't see how they are related at all.

Runlevels are normal for the sysvinit package.  Having the first entry be the 
name of the device you attach to isn't really.  We're already a bit off from 
the norm here.

> I'm talking about the behavior of having a controlling TTY.

The next bugfix release drops tomorrow.  (I have to get on a plane tomorrow 
evening to go to CELF.)  I'm worried that this behavior change might affect 
existing users who are depending on the current behavior, and thus wouldn't 
want it to go into 1.1.2.  It might be a candidate for 1.2.0, though.

> > So the docs should be changed?
>
> If you changed the docs and removed the whole prefix with "-"
> behavior, it
> would internally consistant, but useless.

You're proposing changing behavior that's been in busybox forever.  I just 
checked 1.00 and 0.50 and they were the same way.  That means anybody 
currently using busybox, this change is likely to break.  And your use case 
of where this hit you (you want the login prompt to come up _while_ your init 
scripts are still writing to the console) doesn't strike me as being 
generally applicable: you can't have two programs with the same active 
controlling tty at the same time.  I'm still a little fuzzy on what behavior 
you _want_ there.

If somebody would like to weigh in with a second opinion here I'm all ears, 
but it seems that turning "-" to _not_ grab the tty sounds like a more 
reasonable move?  If nobody's ever noticed this was broken before now, it 
doesn't sound that heavily used?

This isn't code I wrote, maybe I missed earlier bug reports on this, or have a 
poor understanding of the situation...?

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.