Re: subshell on AIX

["Alexander Varakin" <avarakin00 hotmail com>]

Hi Pavel,

> It may happen that some newer versions of AIX will have working /dev/ptmx,
> and forcing them to use the legacy API just because their system is called
> AIX and had a problem in the past would be wrong.

I tested  mc without my patch on both AIX 4.3.3 patch level 9 and AIX 5L
(which is the latest), and subshell doesn't work on both. It also looks like
AIX 4.3.3 will be around for quite a while, se we have to support it as
well.
Thus I believe we must use this legacy interface.

> It would be better if you compiled MC without your patch and debugged
> pty_open_master() to see where it fails.  Then maybe it would be possible
> to detect this problem in the configure script.

This is exactly how I found the problem! It fails while trying to open pty
device, which just doesn't exist on AIX.
I agree that better place to fix the problem is in configure script, but I
don't know how to do that, and I also don't have all those GNU auto config
utilities on my AIX boxes. I also think that we can break some other
platform this way.

One other option is to use some kind of runtime detection of the pty system
which is present, but I am afraid it may also break some other platform.

So I think the safest and easiest fix is using "#ifdef AIX"  approach, which
is exactly what my patch does.


Alex


----- Original Message -----
From: "Pavel Roskin" <proski gnu org>
To: "Alexander Varakin" <avarakin00 hotmail com>
Cc: <mc-devel gnome org>
Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2002 5:11 PM
Subject: Re: subshell on AIX


> Hello, Alexander!
>
> > I think this problem was introduced while moving to autoconfig : the
> > subshell code itself is ok, the problem is that wrong platform specific
code
> > is selected by #ifdef's.
> > Please apply my patch, there are still some poor souls around who have
to
> > work on AIX :)
>
> MC tries to use /dev/ptmx whenever grantpt() function is present.  I
> understand it doesn't work on AIX, so you want to fallback to the BSD
> style pseudoterminals.
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Pavel Roskin
>