Re: Pseudoterminal terminology in POSIX

[Larry Dwyer <larryd.kbd@gmail.com>]

How about the "control" side and the "terminal" side (of the paired 
device files)?

Cheers,
Larry

On 8/5/2020 4:21 AM, Michael Kerrisk via austin-group-l at The Open 
Group wrote:
> Elliot Hughes and I both noticed a point from "Minutes of the 3rd August 2020
> Teleconference":
> 
> [[
> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 5:52 PM Andrew Josey <ajosey@opengroup.org> wrote:
>>
>> All
>> Enclosed are the minutes of yesterdays teleconference
>> regards
>> Andrew
> 
> [...]
> 
>> * General news
>>
>> We discussed terminology usage, in particuler terms such as
>> master/slave, blacklist/whitelist.  It was agreed some terminology
>> for pseudo-terminals could be better described using more functionally
>> descriptive terms, but the details of this are left to a future bug
>> report.  Andrew and Geoff took an action to investigate further
>> and come back with an analysis.
> ]]
> 
> I see that Elliot already replied to the Minutes with some thoughts
> about this. I had already been working on thismail on the topic, which
> reiterates some details that Elliot gave, but also adds some
> information, and brings a lot of relevant people into CC. (I've
> already notified those people that only subscribers can post to the
> Austin list, and presumably those not already subscribed will
> subscribe if they want to add to the discussion.)
> 
> The master-slave terminology with respect to pseudoterminals has
> recently been under active discussion in the GNU C library and Linux
> man-pages mailing lists (see [1]). Currently, we are considering at
> least one possible proposal for a language change, but there may yet
> be others. In any case, I and others thought it would be a wise idea
> to involve TOG in this discussion, so that, ideally, we could come up
> with a shared standard for replacement terminology.
> 
> The proposal that has seen some discussion, and met with some positive
> feedback, is [2]. The concept was proposed by Elliot, inspired by a
> similar change that was made in relevant golang libraries; I've
> written an implementation of the idea (i.e., a proposed patch) for the
> Linux manual pages (again, see [2]).
> 
> The essence of the idea is simple. Let's not invent completely new
> terms, but rather rework existing (familiar) terminology a little, as
> follows:
> 
>      pseudoterminal (device) ==> "pseudoterminal device pair"
> 
>     slave ==> "terminal device"
>             (or "terminal end of the pseudoterminal device pair")
> 
>      master ==> "pseudoterminal device"
>             (or "pseudoterminal end of the pseudoterminal device pair")
> 
> The resulting language (as it appears in the proposed changes for the
> Linux manual pages) is reasonably clear, albeit a little clunky in
> places (wordings like "the (pseudo)terminal end of the pseudoterminal
> device pair" are clear, but a little verbose).
> 
> Aside from the obvious points (raising a bug on the Austin bug
> tracker, and proposing line edits to the standard), is there anything
> else that we can do to help along the process of changing the
> terminology in POSIX? Also, any feedback on the proposal in [2] would be
> welcome.
> 
> With best regards,
> 
> Michael Kerrisk
> 
> [1] https://sourceware.org/pipermail/libc-alpha/2020-July/115792.html
> 
> [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-man/b3b4cf95-5eaa-0b4e-34cc-1a855e7148b6@gmail.com/
> 
>