[kbd] New vt_mode tool for kbd?

Michael Schutte michi at uiae.at
Mon Mar 21 22:25:49 UTC 2011


Hey,

On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 01:13:54AM +0300, Dmitry V. Levin wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 10:42:36PM +0100, Michael Schutte wrote:
> > The console-setup package in Debian needs a way to check for the
> > text/graphics mode of the active VT (from a shell script).  This can be
> > done with “setfont -v -o /dev/null”, for example, but that isn’t very
> > elegant.  Julien Cristau has proposed a small utility (which I’m calling
> > “vt_mode” for now) to report this information in a canonical fashion.
> 
> I wonder whether you actually need to know what's the KD_ mode, or
> maybe your scripts just need yes/no answers on simple two questions:
> - whether the active VT is in the text mode?
> - whether the active VT is in the graphics mode?
> 
> In the latter case, I suggest to implement an utility with an option or
> argument specifying what mode to query, and a tty(1)-like exit status,
> so its use would be as simple as "if vt_mode text; then ...; fi".

Yes, that would certainly work as well; it could even do both things,
depending on the presence of an argument.  I don’t really care either
way (it isn’t even my script, I’m just relaying for the console-setup
developers).  I just figured it would make sense to stick to the way
kbd_mode works.

Cheers,
-- 
Michael Schutte                   | michi@{uiae.at,debian.org}
Innsbruck, Austria                | happily accepting encrypted mail
OpenPGP: 0x16fb 517b a866 c3f6 8f11 1485 f3e4 122f 1D8C 261A
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