Bug 99527 – Interactive command with no input as stdout is redirected in pkg_config.

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[Description Kristian Benoit 2005-07-19 07:14:18 UTC]

When running interactives applications that uses the terminal (curses) in
pkg_config, the program gets a dumb terminal as the output redirected to tee.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
In pkg_config:
1. cd /usr/src/linux
2. make menuconfig

Actual Results:  
You wont be able to give input to menuconfig plus the terminal is of default
size (80x25) even if running in a bigger term.

Expected Results:  
Be able to use programs that uses curses for configuration.

[Comment 1 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2005-07-19 07:24:04 UTC]

Created attachment 63780 [details, diff]
Disables logging during pkg_config

[Comment 2 Kristian Benoit 2005-07-19 07:31:10 UTC]

Created attachment 63781 [details, diff]
Fix for this bug.

There's a little side effect to the fix, it remove the logging from pkg_config.
But sometimes it does not make sens to log anyway, as in any curses/X based
configuration.

[Comment 3 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2005-08-08 04:58:29 UTC]

Does /dev/tty magic work on *BSD and Darwin in the same fashion that it does 
on Linux? It was suggested that packages that wish to use ncurses or such 
should run `exec < /dev/tty > /dev/tty` or something to that effect. Will this 
work as expected? 

[Comment 4 Fabian Groffen 2005-08-08 08:48:59 UTC]

to me, it seems like /dev/tty works the same on ppc-macos as on linux.

if I cat /dev/tty and type something and press return, it is nicely written
twice, so I think it does what you want.

[Comment 5 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2005-08-08 17:51:07 UTC]

{ echo foo >/dev/tty ; } </dev/null &>/dev/null 
 
and 
 
( ( sleep 2 ; echo foo >/dev/tty ) & disown ) </dev/null &>/dev/null 
 
were the two test cases I were given. 

[Comment 6 Stephen Bennett (RETIRED) 2005-08-08 17:56:37 UTC]

Both those testcases work the same way on FreeBSD as on Linux. If OSX behaves
the same way it looks like a reasonable enough workaround.

[Comment 7 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2005-08-08 18:24:36 UTC]

Kito has confirmed that it works on Darwin as well. That means that there's a 
workaround on *NIX systems for the few pkg_config's that won't work with tee 
while the rest can still be logged.