Re: [Queue-developers] Cross-platform termios handling...

[Eric D. <eri...@co...>]

The particular problem I'm trying to address is the passing of 
terminal settings when queueing a job from one platform to another.
One basic problem is that the job control file passes a binary
structure from the queue client to the queued server that 
conveys the current state of the terminal at the client.

When the platform is the same for both the client and server,
this works fine.  Even if queue's terminal handling is not good,
the mechanism does work.

Where this falls apart is when the client and server machines
are different platforms and the native termios structure differs.
In this case, major problems occur because the termios structures can
be arranged differently and have different lengths, which causes
the job control parsing to fail.

So it seems that there are two underlying problems to be solved.
The first is how to abstract the terminal settings between platforms to 
allow the passing of terminal settings from client to server, and the 
second is whether queue should improve its general terminal handling.  

I'm fairly new to queue (cross-platform capability is a must before 
it even becomes useful in my environment), so I don't have any opinion
on how well queue handles terminal settings.  I'm also not familiar
with expect and how it handles terminals.

So I'll repose the original question:  

  1) Does Expect have a modular way of handling terminal IO that could be 
     applied in Queue that would improve the Queue codebase?

  2) Does such a modular architecture change the method that terminal 
     settings would be exchanged between client/server machines such that
     implementing a new terminal-handling scheme would make passing
     settings easier than it currently can be done?

I'd like to get other's input on this before coding up something that
might end up as a band-aid instead of doing this the right way.

Eric

>On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 11:02:54AM -0500, Eric Deal wrote:
>> I have a request for people running queue on various platforms.
>> Please send me a copy of the termios.h header file for platforms
>> that you are using.  
>
>Of all the programs that I know that use terminals like this (queue,
>screen, expect), I've only seen one ever get it right.  Expect.
>
>The last time I looked at queue and it's terminal stuff, because it wasn't
>working on my Linux box, I thought it was pretty much of a mess.
>
>I'd probably suggest that it all be ripped out and steal the stuff from
>expect, and try to track it as a reference source.  No since reinventing
>the wheel when there is a perfectly good one you already use.
>
>mrc
>-- 
>       Mike Castle       Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
>  da...@ix...  and be right all the time, or not work at all
>www.netcom.com/~dalgoda/ and be right at least twice a day.  -- mrc
>    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen
>
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