Passing ownership of mingetty

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 10.11.10 21:33, Bernie Innocenti (bernie at codewiz.org) wrote:

> Hello Petr,
> 
> I ended up being the owner of mingetty by chance, because I used to
> maintain it in the OLPC collection and the previous maintainer released
> the package.

Do we really want to keep mingetty around?

We discussed this a couple of times in the systemd context with people
form various distros. In the interest of standardizing things across
distros we would like to get all distros use the same getty
implementation. Now, as it turns out contrary to what the name suggests
mingetty actually uses a little bit more runtime memory than agetty,
even though mingetty takes up a handful of bytes less disk space. (That
said, the difference in memory and disk space is tiny enough to don't
matter the tiniest bit on modern machines) Now, agetty is actively
maintained inside u-l-ng, and used by most distros, except Fedora and
Suse. Since u-l-ng is a core part of every Linux system and the mingetty
pkg definitely not we started to work on making everybody use agetty and
drop mingetty from the standard install everywhere. That way most
distros would only have to install one getty implementation, and can use
it for both serial consoles and VCs. Also it would use less disk space
(since one getty binary takes less space than two, even if the one we
keep is sligtly larger then the other one we remove), and less runtime
memory. systemd git now ships with a default config which makes use of
agetty, not mingetty -- on all distros.

You apparently see value in keeping two almost identical getty
implementations around. Can you elaborate why? Is there any feature
missing in agetty that mingetty has?

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering - Red Hat, Inc.