Subject: Com port naming

From: [email-masked] (Paul Lalonde)
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 92 11:53:30 EST

Ted writes:
>   From: Chuck Boyer <[email-masked]>

>   /hdwd0
>   /hdwd1
>   /hdwd2.....

>   /hdscssi0
>   /hdscssi1
>   /hdscssi2...

>Blech!  Those names are ugly!  I would much rather prefer /dev/wd,
>/dev/sd, etc.....   People will learn fairly quickly what they are; and
>in any case the "d" in "wd" and "sd" should be enough of a tipoff that
>we're talking about a disk unit instead of a tape unit.

	I agree.  Very ugly.  I prefer wd and wd, with links to hd[0-?].

>As for zero based versus one based for the serial ports, I would make
>the argument that (for better or for worse) due to long association with
>MS-DOS the hardware ports for the "first" serial port and the "second"
>serial port are COM1 and COM2.  While renumbering them to be zero based
>may be the Unix Way, I think that it will cause way to much confusion.
>I would much rather see /dev/ttys1, /dev/ttys2, /dev/ttys3, and
>/dev/ttys4 for COM1, COM2, COM3, and COM4, respectively.

I much prefer zero based ports.  Dos is brain-dead and I see no reason
to keep it that way.  Even the boards are labelled 0 and 1 (at least on
my box).  So use /dev/ttys[0-3], and make links to /dev/com[1-4] if
you need them.  Or even put the existence of the links in the standard
if you feel very stronly about them.  But /dev/ttys[1-4] is just too
much of a nasty hybrid.

	Paul

 Paul A. Lalonde	 	Internet: [email-masked]
 Home Phone: (613)549-0605	Work Phone: (613)545-6754

	"The only true law is that which leads to freedom"
			- Richard Bach, _Jonathan Livingston Seagull_

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From: Theodore Ts'o <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 92 12:29:54 -0500

I don't know about you, but all of my documentation for my serial cards
(admittedly, they're rice paddy specials) use COM1 and COM2 when
describing the various jumper positions.  I have yet to see a hardware
documentation for serial cards which use a zero-based notation --- if
they don't use the COM1-4 designation, they use the I/O port base
address.  (Perhaps I am wrong; if someone can present me with evidence
that a majority of the hardware actually uses a zero-based system,
please do so.  I would be very surprised.)

I agree that DOS is bletcherous.  But that's beside the point.  The
question is which would be more confusing: a zero-based or one-based
numbering scheme for serial ports.  I would argue that the one-based
numbering scheme goes beyond DOS --- that's the way things are screened
onto the PC boards (as jumper positions) of many serial cards, and that
few (if any) hardware documentation uses a zero-based system.

Granted, the fact that most hardware refers to COM1-4 ports is due to a
long assotiation with DOS; the hardware people didn't want to create
boards which would be confusing to the vast installed base of MS-DOS
users --- up until recently, if you purchased a PC clone, there would be
a 99.97% chance you would be running DOS.  I know a lot of people
believe that a zero-based system would be aesthetically cleaner, but we
lost that chance about eight years ago.  If we use a zero-based system,
it will be us who will be confusing a lot of users by bucking a
long-standing convention.

						- Ted

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From: [email-masked] (Michael K. Johnson)
Date: Tue, 31 Mar 92 13:47:15 CST

From: [email-masked] (Paul Lalonde)

I second the motion:  ttys[0-4] (or whatever we call the serial ports)
and if people want to call them com[1-4], that's fine.  I think that
saying that people will be confused by the zero-base is looking too
much in the short term -- if we have com[1-4] as links, people won't
get too confused now, and as people come to understand that most of
the devices (with the exception of devices where there is a concept of
"current device") are zero-based, then ttys/tts[0-3] will make more
sense.  I vote for the long run, as I see it...

just my $0.02.

michaelkjohnson
[email-masked]