[again restoring the CC] On 8/5/20 5:28 PM, Paul Smith via austin-group-l at The Open Group wrote: > On Wed, 2020-08-05 at 08:00 -0700, Donn Terry via austin-group-l at The > Open Group wrote: >> The suggestions here so far are cumbersome and tend to be ambiguous. >> The old m-word and sl-word, and also "client" and "server" could >> potentially be interpreted backwards from the conventional intent. >> (You can think about it as the sl-word/client actually being in >> control: telling the m-word/server what it's supposed to be doing, >> e.g. "execute this command line".) >> >> How about "provider" and "consumer"? "Pseudoterminal provider" and >> "...consumer" seem (at least to me) to be unambiguous in terms of the >> reversal above, (reasonably) clear in meaning, and politically >> neutral. Have the other discussions not shown here considered this? > > To me even "provider" / "consumer" still has this issue: do you > consider the pseudoterminal as providing to the terminal, or the > terminal as providing to the pseudoterminal. Both seem legitimate > enough interpretations to create confusion. That was my immediate thought also, unfortunately. That said, again, I think if we settle on a terminology (even provider/consumer), people will adapt. (But, i still prefer pseudoterminal/terminal or ancillary/primary). > To remove ambiguity perhaps we need to think about the attributes that > are unique to each element of the pair and use that in the term, for > example "backend" / "frontend". > > This would have to be introduced, something like "a pseudoterminal > device pair consists of a backend terminal device and a frontend > pseudoterminal device". Yes. The terminology, whatever it is, needs to be introduced and defined. That alone will remove a lot of ambiguity, regardless of the terms that are settled on. Thanks, Michael
