Re: vax wscons setting questions

It may go back to something else I think.

I have never given a thought to the fact that I need to add new entries 
in /dev for new devices, it has always been a natural thing to do, 
wscons or not, but it might be that people expect a devfs to be present 
these days.

-- Ragge


Den 2024-02-04 kl. 01:33, skrev Johnny Billquist:
> Well, I would argue that *very few* ever thought about using wscons on 
> VAX. Most would have been using a serial console, or else the simple 
> bit mapped console straight up.
>
> I certainly never even considered using wscons on VAXen. Although I 
> have been running VAXen more or less continously for about 30 years.
>
>   Johnny
>
> On 2024-02-04 00:55, Mouse wrote:
>>>>>> +    makedev wscons
>>>>> i'm surprised it is 2024 and we're doing this.
>>>> Doing what?  [...]
>>
>> [tsutsui@]
>>
>>> He also said "please do" so I assume it's obviously
>>> "to add wscons target to the default MAKEDEV all op"
>>
>> Hm, that didn't seem obvious to me.  I read it as, to expand a little,
>> "I'm surprised it's 2024 and we're still doing something this
>> backward" (with the "please do" being something along the lines of
>> "please do it, since that's how we still have to do it"). Perhaps I've
>> just seen too many people say things like "I'm surprised it's [date]
>> and [thing]" with meaning clearly (usually from additional text) of
>> "how come we're so behind the times".
>>
>> But, in this case, as mrg@ clarified,
>>
>>> that it took until 2024 to have this patch proposed.
>>
>> so I clearly was misreading.  My apologies.
>>
>>> that means anyone who has been using wscons on vax has been manually
>>> setting it up for a very long time....
>>
>> Has anyone?  I was under the impression - though formed mostly from
>> absence of evidence, not evidence of absence - that vax has been mostly
>> going unused ever since the broken compiler, the one that couldn't
>> self-host, was dropped in.
>>
>> It also wouldn't surprise me if the few diehards who have been using it
>> all this time have been upgrading existing installs, which for the
>> first switch to wscons likely meant manual fixups and since then have
>> been using existing /dev entries.
>>
>> Or have been using some other X, such as MIT X.  I sure know my few
>> brushes with X.org on non-peecee hardware have hardly enamoured me of
>> using it in cases where it's not actually needed (in my experience,
>> such need is most commonly for hardware support reasons).
>>
>> /~\ The ASCII                  Mouse
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