RE: [MiNT] What's in, what's out?

[Mario Becroft <mb@gem.win.co.nz>]

On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:

> Both myself and Mario (maybe others, I don't recall) pointed out
> that since what's desired is a shutdown(); then having a daemon
> that requests one should be sufficient.
> 
> Mario even pointed out that, on his Linux PC (where SIGPWR is
> already available), he does things that way.

The ONLY thing I said was that in case it interests anyone, I was using a
UPS without that signal successfully on a Linux system. I.e. it can be
done. It is the APC UPS software that works this way, other software
doesn't. I am not claiming that this is or is not sufficient for MiNT. (I
am not knowledgable enough to judge.)

I can see the point of increasing compatibility with a OS like Linux. It
means that MiNT users can benefit from the vast amount of software
development going on on that platform. I think this is a good thing.

I believe SIGPWR signal is used by a lot of power management software on
Linux and I do think it would be good if that software could be used under
MiNT. I don't have a UPS on my TT because it is non-critical and the power
is quite good here. I may get a UPS sometime and I would like to be able
to use it.

I do suspect that there needs to be more discussion about new features. I
also had the feeling that a lot of new features or changes were added
without much discussion on this mailing list.

I do have an idea that a human-readable interface like this /kern
filesystem is not the sort of thing that should be in the kernel. But I am
not an expert on these matters. However I am inclined to believe that the
kernel should have binary interfaces and if a human-readable interface is
needed a separate program should be used. This is how the existing /proc
filesystem works, I think. I do not like the idea of having a program
parse the human readable output when it would be so much faster, smaller
and easier to have a binary interface.

But if /kern is Linux compatible and this will mean that a lot of useful
Linux software can now be used on MiNT then maybe it is a good thing.

But so far I haven't read anything specific about what /kern will be good
for.

But in general I am not too critical of these things. As I said I am just
a user, and as long as MiNT is becoming more compatible, getting more
features and otherwise being improved I am happy with it.

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| Mario Becroft           * Tariland, New Zealand Atari User Group      |
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