Re: [gpsd-dev] Progress is being made towards a GPSD release

[Frank Nicholas]

On Feb 3, 2015, at 1:08 PM, Eric S. Raymond <address@hidden> wrote:

Frank Nicholas <address@hidden>:

On Feb 3, 2015, at 9:48 AM, Eric S. Raymond <address@hidden> wrote:

Frank Nicholas reports total test failure on Gentoo.  Why is unknown,
but I have seen something like that on Debian porterboxes built
without pty support.
--

I do manually configure/build my kernel.  I grep’d “.config” for “PTY” and found these relevant entries:
CONFIG_UNIX98_PTYS=y
# CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS is not set

Is “CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS” required?

I don't know, but you're providing suggestive evidence that it might be.
--
<a href=""http://www.catb.org/~esr/" class="">http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

I originally left this out of my kernel config due to this description from 'make menuconfig’:

  │ CONFIG_LEGACY_PTYS:                                                                                             │  
  │                                                                                                                 │  
  │ A pseudo terminal (PTY) is a software device consisting of two                                                  │  
  │ halves: a master and a slave. The slave device behaves identical to                                             │  
  │ a physical terminal; the master device is used by a process to                                                  │  
  │ read data from and write data to the slave, thereby emulating a                                                 │  
  │ terminal. Typical programs for the master side are telnet servers                                               │  
  │ and xterms.                                                                                                     │  
  │                                                                                                                 │  
  │ Linux has traditionally used the BSD-like names /dev/ptyxx                                                      │  
  │ for masters and /dev/ttyxx for slaves of pseudo                                                                 │  
  │ terminals. This scheme has a number of problems, including                                                      │  
  │ security.  This option enables these legacy devices; on most                                                    │  
  │ systems, it is safe to say N.                                                                                   │