The advantage of a PTY paradigm is that there is simply an input/output stream consisting of text and control commands, which can be transparantly sent over the network (ssh), over a RS-232 link (embedded debugging), and so on.
What would you propose as a replacement? There have been ideas of using HTML/JS, streams and objects instead (see TermKit), among other things. Which certainly has some advantages. But for most things, the current terminal works fine. The terminal is mainly used as fallback anyway, new developments mostly focus on GUIs.
Don't get me wrong: it would be great if people agreed on one TERMCAP format and threw away the rest (just like I'd love people to just settle on UTF-8 encoding for text). But that seems to be the case in recent distro's. They work out of the box. I haven't had to bother with TERMCAP settings in Linux in like 10 years... with Solaris it's a different issue...
And I agree that the /usr directory structure being cleaned up was long due.
No offense but I'd rather not elaborate except to refer you again to Plan 9 as a proof of feasibility: thousand of man hours have been spent by people using Plan 9 to interact with remote shells.
What would you propose as a replacement? There have been ideas of using HTML/JS, streams and objects instead (see TermKit), among other things. Which certainly has some advantages. But for most things, the current terminal works fine. The terminal is mainly used as fallback anyway, new developments mostly focus on GUIs.
Don't get me wrong: it would be great if people agreed on one TERMCAP format and threw away the rest (just like I'd love people to just settle on UTF-8 encoding for text). But that seems to be the case in recent distro's. They work out of the box. I haven't had to bother with TERMCAP settings in Linux in like 10 years... with Solaris it's a different issue...
And I agree that the /usr directory structure being cleaned up was long due.