Re: what is TERM?

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org> writes:

  > Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu> writes:
  > 
  > > Does anyone know what the #ifdef TERM code in src/s/gnu-linux.h is
  > > supposed to do?
  > >
  > > process.c has this:
  > > /* TERM is a poor-man's SLIP, used on GNU/Linux.  */
  > > #ifdef TERM
  > > #include <client.h>
  > > #endif
  > >
  > > Nothing defines TERM, so can all the code that depends on it go?
  > 
  > You can compile with -DTERM, I suppose.  term is a serial line
  > communications program not requiring administrator priviledges used for
  > tunneling TCP ports to a normal dialup modem login.  Since no admin
  > rights are required for tunneling, the local programs need to be
  > recompiled with a special library so that they try looking up the ports
  > on the other side first.
  > 
  > In that manner, one can, for example, use Emacs on the local machine for
  > reading Usenet and sending Mail to the remote machine where one just has
  > a normal terminal account.
  > 
  > It is probably not used all too much anymore: pure terminal dialups have
  > become rather rare.  One reference I found on the web is
  > <URL:http://www.cit.gu.edu.au/~anthony/info/usage/term_howto.html>.

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

So is it worth keeping this code?  
To use this code one would have to hack the build system to use an
undocumented flag (-DTERM), and to want to use network connections in
emacs in a not very common setup.