Reasons to preseve X on tty7

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 10:32 -0400, Brian Wheeler wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-10-29 at 10:25 -0400, Felix Miata wrote:
> > On 2008/10/29 08:26 (GMT-0400) Brian Wheeler composed:
> > 
> > > Almost all of the "reasons" from the original email boil down to "we've
> > > always done it this way".  
> > 
> > Don't boil it down. The reasons are good why we've always done it this way
> > and should keep the status quo. I haven't seen sufficient reason in this
> > thread to dismiss those reasons.
> 
> _What_ are the good reasons why we've done it this way?  Its only tty7
> because someone arbitrarily decided to run 6 getty processes way back
> when.  If someone had decided that 4 was sufficient, then we'd be
> arguing about tty5.
> 
> At least with X being on tty1 it makes sense since its the primary
> terminal for most people.  
Well, this change adds non-determinism to what tty1 actually is.

Play around a little with booting rawhide into runlevel 3 rsp. 5 and
switching between runlevel 3 and 5. I did so today and occasionally
ended up with X11 on tty7 sometimes on tty1 and sometimes with the
machine going down the hard way.

> The only non-"but that's the way it's always been" argument I've seen
> thus far is documentation
Correct, it is a convention, just like any other arbitrary convention on
key interpretation, just like "Ctrl-Alt-Del", "Ctrl-Alt-Backspace" or
"Del" and "Backspace" (linux veterans might recall the dispute on Del
vs. Backspace) rsp. the DEC/Vt100 keycodes in terminals (Which Linux
new-comers might never have heard about).

> ...which is something that can be changed.
Why should it be changed?

So far there simply is no technical reason for why it should be changed.

Ralf