On Thu, Feb 24, 2000 at 12:18:18PM -0500, Mike A. Harris wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2000, James A Simmons wrote:
>
> >Linus orginally wrote it. It has been modified but it really hasn't
> >changed much. When 2.5.X comes out this will change. Several people will
> >be working on the new console system.
>
> Who? I'd like to see their code/ideas, etc.. Perhaps test out
> existing effort...
>
I am pretty sure James was not referring to me but i have kept hacking
on the console code on and off for the last two years, trying to make
it a full ECMA (or ISO/IEC what ever you prefer) implementation with
as much DEC VT compatibility as possible.
Attached is a work-in-progress patch against 2.3.40. Right now i am
thinking about how to implement real underlined, double underlined,
overlined, rapidly blinking attributes etc. That touches the fb
drivers as well. (Explanation: the IBM MDA/Hercules adaptors had
underlined attribute, CGA/EGA/VGA not. Instead the console driver
mapped it to a color attribute. With framebuffer console becoming
the standard, this is no longer necessary)
The most difficult part (other than ECMA/ISO conformant character
and font handling) will be to implement bi-directionality (IIRC some
languages write right-to-left while numbers are written left-to-right,
or people might want to mix languages, so simply switching the character
progression does not cut it, there is more to do and that's why ECMA/ISO
implements special control functions for it).
The easiest part will be to implement ECMA/ISO conformant color
handling (the ECMA/ISO sequences have defined colors like black, white
red, magenta,... instead of color registers).
Yours,
Dominik Kubla
PS. And before someone thats to argue that this patch changes a lot
of code only cosmetically: console.c is so larges that it becomes
unmaintainable IMHO. So some of the changes are in preparation of
splitting it up into the device handling part, the console switching
stuff and the terminal emulation (which then could be made configurable.
who knows somemone might prefere a HP or Siemens emluation to DEC...)
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