[TUHS] 4.1c bsd ptrace man entry ("ptrace is unique and arcane")

[ron minnich]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 12:34 PM Norman Wilson <norman at oclsc.org> wrote:
>
> It's interesting that this comment about ptrace was written
> as early as 1980.
>
> Ron Minnich's reference to Plan 9 /proc misses the mark, though.

your comment about my comment misses the mark; I was not talking about
the origins of /proc. This is probably because I was not clear and
probably because few people realize that the plan 9 process debugging
interface was strings written and read to/from /proc/<pid>/[various
files], rather than something like ptrace.

The first time I saw that debug-interface-in-proc in plan 9, it made
me think back to the 4.1c bsd manual ptrace comment, and I wondered if
there was any path that led from this man page entry to the ideas in
the plan 9 methods.

I actually implemented the plan 9 debug model in linux back around
2007, but was pretty sure getting it upstream would never happen, so
let it die.

ron