[Info-vax] DECnet Phase IV broken after VSI update

[David Jones]

On Saturday, October 30, 2021 at 10:26:27 PM UTC-4, Lawrence D’Oliveiro wrote:
> What is the need for FTDRIVER, exactly? Isn’t there some standard pseudo-terminal facility equivalent to pty(7) <https://manpages.debian.org/bullseye/manpages/pty.7.en.html>? On Linux, SSH service is implemented entirely in userland.

FTDRIVER is the pseudo-terminal facility included with OpenVMS. I first saw it appear with DECWindows 
DECterms (I think VWS did something different, but may be wrong). The nomenclature is different, 
pseudoterminal and control program rather than slave and master device-pair, but the concepts are the
same. 

My biggest problem with SET TERM/INQUIRE was that it purged the typeahead buffer in order to prevent
it's contents being interpreted as the terminal's response to the identify query. I had the habit of typing
in my first command before the prompt appeared, so the typeahead purge would clip off the beginning
of what I typed. I had to deal with a similar issue with my multi-line editing code for the SQLite shell, but
involving a cursor position report rather than device type query.