I am not really in the mood to sell all the benifits of doing this---but dpkg felt obligated to support all the nonstandard comoressors APIs of compressors that all supported the standard gzip interface, because of a percieved slowness of the 386's MMU. Now that we have FDPIC binaries that run both with and without a MMU this is no longer an excuse to be weird.

But I do think it would be easiest to do this, without any changes to the compilers (or god-forbid the c standard), by making stdin stdout and stderr (always been 0 1 and 2) stored in thread-local storage.

But supporting that instead of just 0 1 and 2 would only be necessary for using the c abi (which is not UNIX!) at the same time as the shell api. Otherwise Linux can handle it.

Sorry for not selling this like soap,

Shawn Paul Landden