Hello, Gentoo.
On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 16:06:38 +0000, Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2021 at 22:15:25 -0000, Grant Edwards wrote:
> > On 2021-01-13, Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de> wrote:
> > > I think bringing up a new Gentoo system absolutely requires working in
> > > the console, certainly up to the point where X11 and a Window Manager
> > > have been installed and debugged.
> > I usually install Gentoo via ssh.
> > The article I read about the removal of Linux console's backscrolling
> > feature said it was mostly due to lack of a maintainer for that code,
> > and that if somebody stepped forward to maintain it, it could be revived.
> I'm doing my best to step forward, but I suspect that will be almost as
> difficult as fixing the bugs in it. ;-)
And so it transpired. I subscribed to the linux-kernel list for a short
time, and offered my services in a post. Not one single reply did I get.
That list is not a friendly one. It gets an almost unmanageable ~2000
posts a day, the vast bulk of which are patches, fragmented into,
perhaps, one diff hunk per post.
> I'm disappointed that the decision to cut out this important feature was
> taken without any serious attempt to find a maintainer. I have the
> impression (though I may be wrong), that the problem was talked about on
> the linux kernel mailing list, but nobody there took it upon himself to
> post on any of the more hard-core distributions' mailing lists, such as
> gentoo's.
I've come to realise that Linus Torvalds, who personally took the
decision to remove the scrolling, doesn't care about users, and indeed
regards them with disdain. He cares about _customers_, and Linux's
customers are RedHat, Suse, IBM, Intel, and the other HW manufacturers.
RedHat customers don't use the console, therefore the console isn't
important. It's a bit like Microsoft's attitude towards users.
Sure, Linus went through the motions of pretending to try to find a
maintainer, but didn't put any serious effort into it. He argued that
"nobody" uses it anyway, therefore it is unimportant, which is an ironic
echo of the argument that nobody uses Linux on a desktop PC.
Even if the bugs came to be fixed, I doubt the scrolling would be allowed
back into the kernel, for the above reasons. Exactly what the bugs are
in the scrolling code wasn't gone into on the list, despite more than one
contributor asking.
> > FWOW, if you really want backscrolling on the console, you can get
> > that with screen, but doing so would drive me nuts, since I'd have to
> > break all my fingers to stop them from typeing ctrl-A to move the
> > start of a line. I've switched screen's meta-character a few times,
> > but everytime I try that I find my fingers already have something else
> > assigned to that control character (which I had forgotten about). It
> > would be nice if I could print out my fingers' assignment table to
> > find an unused control character, but that doesn't seem to be how it
> > works.
> Can one set up a "basic" screen which doesn't use a meta-character?
I don't know what I'll be doing, long term. For the moment, I'll be
hanging onto the working kernel I've got, old though it may be (4.19.97).
It might be possible (I'm not sure) to hook up a user space program to
the keys <shift>-<PageUp/Down> which would take care of the scrolling.
This would obviously not work with early kernel messages, but would be
better than nothing. I had a look at the GNU screen source code
yesterday to see how it managed such things, but it is very sparsely
commented, and thus hard work to understand.
Maybe I should just cut my losses, and convert to using one of the BSDs.
> > --
> > Grant
--
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).
