Bug#2317: Output from mesg

[and1000@cam.ac.uk (Austin Donnelly)]

In article <[🔎] 199602121100.MAA06295@feivel.informatik.rwth-aachen.de> you write:
[...]
>The output of mesg goes to stderr. Since stderr is used to set the
>permissions it is also tested if stderr is a tty. Hence there is no way to
>re-direct the output. However, I know quite a lot of user who do an
>
>msgwas=`mesg | cut -f2 -d' '`
>mesg n
>
>before starting X.
>
>mesg $msgwas
>
>afterwards restores the original settings. This is needed to get some info
>under X, e.g. talk requests.

Yes, I can see that this is a valid use of mesg. However, the mesg
in bsdutils package is the true blue, BSD4.4 one.

I agree that it's a little silly in putting its output to stderr; however,
that's the way the BSD people did it.

>Othere mesg binaries like the one by Miquel that comes along with sysvinit
>behave well.

In this case, I think that Debian should use the mesg from sysvinit,
rather than the BSD one.

Does Miquel <miquels@cistron.nl> feel like adding mesg to
his Debian sysvinit package ?

Austin