[Toybox] [PATCH] clear.c: Clear scrollback buffer on non-vte (gnome based) terminals

[Rob Landley]

On 3/5/24 18:31, enh via Toybox wrote:
>> We have a 7-10 year support horizon, How many terminal escape protocols have been relevant
>> in the last 10 years: One. The story is the same for UTF8 and LP64

There's a certain amount of 80/20 going on.

If you 80/20 twice you get 96%. (80% of the remaining 20%.)

If you 80/20 THREE times you get 99.2%.

Diminishing returns kick in real fast. I usually do one round and wait for
people to show up with use cases.

> (to be fair, toybox does support ILP32 too, not just LP64 --- it's
> just weird stuff like Windows' LLP64 that's explicitly out of scope
> aiui.)

They made their bed, explicitly and intentionally:

  https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050131-00/?p=36563

And then they made Windows Subsystem for Linux. (Twice, apparently.)

> i honestly still
> don't believe hurd actually exists!

It technically exists, it just doesn't WORK.

> i've never seen it, whereas i've
> actively used all the others you mention, plus the two i just
> mentioned, and Tru64 too. if you want "obscure but definitely a real
> thing", how about Plan 9?)

Eh, that wasn't exactly obscure, it was just tied up in really stupid
AT&T->Lucent licensing shenanigans until ~Y2K (so that nobody could SEE it
without forking over thousands of dollars, rumors of greatness but nobody had
personal experience), by which point it was about ten years moot. But it got
looted for a bunch of ideas like procfs, and Linux virtfs is a v9fs is 9p2000.L.

https://landley.net/kdocs/ols/2010/ols2010-pages-109-120.pdf

You want obscure, the Bell Labs guys kept doing Unix releases after v7, all the
way through v10, before starting over with Plan 9. They just never got published
outside of the labs (for the same reason Plan9 didn't, the commercialization
drive). They finally got released to the public about the same time Plan 9 did:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/

By the way, while FIPS 151-2 was in force and posix compliance was a requirement
to qualify for federal procurement contracts, EVERYBODY did a Unix. Apple did a
unix for mac hardware in 1988:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

Dell did a Unix:

https://gunkies.org/wiki/Dell_UNIX

Commodore did a unix for the amiga:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix

Microsoft lied and claimed that Windows NT was a unix:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

The "unix wars" got REALLY WEIRD for a while there.

Rob

(P.S. When I say "weird" I mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_(software)
which yes, I used as a teenager.)