JdeBP

… and multi-byte character set support was added for nvi2 about a decade and a half ago.

* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/vi-family.html

You are looking at the wrong one. Look at /rescue/vi .

"ANSI Art" has been the true problem name all along. "ASCII Art" used the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. "ANSI Art" did not use the American National Standards Institute.

Even if one took it to mean using ECMA 35 and ECMA 48 escape and control sequences, which wholly forgets the likes of Avatar and PCBoard, "ANSI Art" usually did not actually use any ECMA 35 character set switching, instead relying upon SAUCE data and suchlike and using IBM's (not ANSI's nor ECMA's) rather different code page system and 8-bit character sets, and usually furthermore misinterpreted ECMA 48 SGR sequences when it came to blinking, bright, faint, and bold.

If people are preferring "XTerm Art" or "Terminal Art" for what is made nowadays, that seems to be a nomenclature change for the better.

Oh, it really wasn't. If you want the terrible reality, start with how FidoNet CHARSET and CHRS 'kludge lines' tried to make this work.

I enjoyed the default timezone and the timezone set by init, even though that latter is not following the IANA conventions. Turnabout is fair play for the decades that some of us had PST8PDT hardwired as the default timezone by some operating system makers. (-:

That said: please do not become yet another abuser of the 'xterm' terminal type ('xterm-16color' in this case). Thomas Dickey has a lot to say on the subject of things that pretend to be XTerm and are not. Windows NT has first-class terminal types of its own, and has had for about 30 years at this point. Pick whether you're going to be cloning the old CSRSS or the new Microsoft Terminal, or even something else like the old POSIX subsystem or MS/PC/DR-DOS.

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-i...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-m...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#tic-w...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

* https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/terminfo.src.html#toc-_...

I was wondering whether the Guide pointed to the actual doco. The Guide is not perfect. I had not yet checked. (NetBSD has a Guide; FreeBSD has a Handbook; OpenBSD has a FAQ. One of the reasons for keeping the names straight is that there is something else called by its authors the OpenBSD Handbook, which is not produced by the OpenBSD people, and is a perennial thorn in their sides when people come to them with "I read in your Handbook that …" problems.)

Reading that chapter, it turns out that it does. Maybe it should stress the point more, but the actual doco is the likes of these:

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/evbarm-aarch64...

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/i386/INSTALL.h...

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amd64/INSTALL....

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/amiga/INSTALL....

* https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-11.0/sparc64/INSTAL...

… and so forth. Plus the manual pages for postinstall(8) and the like.

If those are Elantech or Synaptics touchpads, then this is the bug report to get behind:

* https://gnats.netbsd.org/60897

I think that it is specifically the interaction between ihidev and ACPI. The hardware devices themselves are PS/2, with a vendor-specific extension to PS/2 activated by a special handshake, plus I2C. (On machines from 2024 that come with 9 USB root hubs; such is the inertia of laptop design.)

There definitely was, and still is. Copyright is not defined by the presence of a "(C)", a "(c)", or even a "©" in some text. What the ASCII/ANSI Art world did not have was a culture of litigiousness. People rarely even made a fuss over copying. In part this was because the whole mechanism that got the art distributed to its viewership involved huge amounts of breaches of then copyright law.

(The legal frameworks that allowed computer systems to be exempt from copyright restrictions, if they were just making copies in the ordinary course of transmitting things around computer networks, did not exist until the turn of the 21st century. Under U.K. law, for example, the way that the WWW worked was technically a massive violation of copyright until The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 came along.)

The law was not different. People's attitudes were.

We tried that in the 1980s with MS/PC/DR-DOS and code pages. We also had BBS networks where people shared such files around the world. One language per file turned out to be a bad idea.

We're going to have the it-conflicts-with-GNU-parallel discussion again. It has happened almost every time that this has come up on Hacker News since 2015.

This is entirely a packaging choice. There is no reason that parallel cannot be in its own package, or renamed. In fact, do not believe the old Hacker News discussions where people point to a bug filed in 2010 being closed as 'WONTFIX' by Joey Hess. In the intervening years, Debian has instituted a wild system where it does rename the moreutils parallel, but only if GNU Parallel is also installed. Because Debian made its GNU Parallel package fix the name clash.

* https://sources.debian.org/src/parallel/20240222%2Bds-2/debi...

There is nowadays an open bug report (against moreutils rather than parallel) on this from a user's perspective:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1107381

In contrast, Arch Linux simply changed its packaging to eliminate the name clash back in 2012, by fixing moreutils and not parallel, making it always the parallel-moreutils command.

* https://gitlab.archlinux.org/archlinux/packaging/packages/mo...

I don't need it.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44916853

The real challenge is not finding another channel for transmitting personal information. It is finding something else for the FINGER protocol to do. (-:

I made two additional wrong guesses, the Advanced RISC Computer class of machine firmware and the file archiving utility from System Enhancement Associates. (-:

(Back when the headline was "Arc is Sunsetting". I am so 2 minutes ago.)

How far Apple has come from the OpenSTEP days, when it would have been called /Package (if the guesses at are correct). (-:

Nobody is interested in bitmap fonts?

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/nosh/guide/terminal-resources.htm...

I don't know about that. In some places ('m', '0') it is closer to Ubuntu Mono.

It has a slashed zero:

https://github.com/tywr/Nordwand-Mono/blob/main/src/glyphs/n...

Xe misconstrues how the standards process works, a bit. Standards don't develop out of thin air. Usually they standardize some sort of existing practice, and in this case that existing practice was DEC VTs.

In addition, there was ECMA-35 as well as ECMA-48. ECMA-35 provides some important context to ECMA-48, and the reason that ECMA-48 appears to not concretely define some stuff is that actually that stuff is in ECMA-35.

vttest post-dated these standards by three quarters of a decade for the latter and by a dozen years for the former, and wasn't really a comprehensive test suite until the 1990s.

It is amusing to see this point made in a discussion that is notionally about one of the BSDs.

"Those that do not learn history" and so forth.

It has needed some fixing over the years. errno was one thing. There have been a number of things in that vein, where Bernstein relied upon 1989 C or even K&R semantics and suchlike.

But compared to some other code from the 1990s, it has lasted the test of time quite well.

* https://jdebp.uk/Softwares/djbwares/

Your toaster does not run NetBSD? (-:

Thank you, but no. I'll stick with /dev/tty0 . It's federated.

That would be the self-consistent choice. But it is debatable that it is the right choice when things like the <ctype.h> functions sometimes fall over, either accidentally or deliberately, if erroneously given a signed char, and sign extension can sometimes accidentally yield an EOF value.

That explains all of the .ptl source files, which I didn't recognize straightaway.

Go and read the source code on the GitHub repository that the page links to as "Downloads". There's a LICENSE.md there, and a fair amount besides.

It is interesting that it differentiates between oblique and italic, something that not many fonts aimed at the monospace crowd do, in both the English and Cyrillic alphabets. The list of variants for the letter k is longer than I expected.

Alas, it is oblong, not square.

And 7 thousand-odd code points is not as large a range as it used to be a couple of decades ago. That said, it does have MouseText, the 7-segment LED digits, and suchlike from the Supplementary Plane 1.

What makes you think that the U.K. isn't adopting electric vehicles? I can tell you from direct visual observation that people are. The little green numberplate rectangles are fairly common, now.

* https://rac.co.uk/drive/news/electric-vehicles-news/1-in-3-n...

The only rather sad part is around 2/3 of the way through, where the author had to use a pre-compiled binary from the Internet Archive, because the original WWW site had rotted away, and the source code did not assemble. This stuff tends to rot if the community does not do the preservation work.

That said, Sergey Bulba's WWW site is still around and the relevant stuff can be found today at https://ay.strangled.net/progr_e.htm . But the continued existences of things like this are not the sort of things to take for granted.

The Z shell's, C shell's, and others's syntaxes for setting the PATH environment variable via a shell array variable alias also does the tilde expansion.

    path=( $path ~/bin )

It's worth noting, also, that the path and manpath settings in login.conf(5) expand leading tildes in individual search path items.

* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=login.conf&sektion...

So putting the addition of things like ~/bin to PATH in /etc/login_conf and ~/.login_conf instead of shell scripts is another way to address it.

    :path=~/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/pkg/bin /usr/bin /bin:

It's particularly handy when there are multiple login shells in use.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/BSDs-for-Linux-users/login-conf.html

> So couldn't we just use the build system to do the probing?

Yes, indeed. And I do exactly that with a Bernstein redo build system. Daniel J. Bernstein had this idea decades ago, with the has/try system evident in publicfile back in in 1999, for example. Converted to redo, which Bernstein never did, it looks like this:

* https://github.com/jdebp/nosh/tree/trunk/source/config

Notice that all.do at the top level does

    redo-ifchange -- config/all

before pretty much everything else, which invokes the config/all.do at that level, which in turn builds all of the headers via their has*.h.do files and using the try*.cpp files. config/cxx.do builds the name of the compiler, as picked up by ./compile at the top level. config/cxxflags.do builds its flags.

redo handles rebuilding everything as necessary, including all of the programs that include the feature test headers, if a has*.h.do file changes, a try*.cpp file changes, the compiler/linker options change, or the ./compile and ./link scripts change. It's even possible, although I don't do it, once ${cxx} has been determined in cxx.do, to do a

    redo-ifchange -- "${cxx}"

and make the whole thing sensitive to the actual compiler changing. I don't do it in the nosh build because it's not worth being that sensitive to the tooling. I actually do do it in the djbwares build (which collects publicfile and various other Bernstein softwares under a single umbrella).

So yes, using the very same build system that is building the software to build the feature probes is an idea that is at least a quarter century old, and Daniel J. Bernstein was almost there. Xe just never published an actual redo that could do what xe called 'honest prerequisites'. Xe got as far as ./choose in a Makefile, though.

* http://jdebp.info./FGA/introduction-to-redo.html

* https://cr.yp.to/redo/honest-script.html

* https://salsa.debian.org/debian/publicfile/-/blob/master/Mak...

Indeed. Try telling them that the BBC Micro keyboard had arrow keys that moved a 'copy cursor' about. We should probably never tell them about the ZX Spectrum keyboard. (-: