Re: HEADS UP: terminfo imported into -current

[Roy Marples <roy%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Wednesday 03 February 2010 20:47:17 Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 05:24:54PM +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> > A quick look at the code suggests this is to purely set the number of
> > columns and lines in the window. A lot of applications respect $COLUMNS
> > and $LINES - would it not be better (and more portable) to set those?
> 
> Why exactly is it that $TERMCAP support was removed?  This seems like
> a wholly different change from simply implementing terminfo -- and a
> bad one.

Coverting termcap definitions to terminfo definitions, whilst possible, is non 
trivial. There is also the case where some termcap caps make no sense in 
terminfo and vice versa, so whilst a conversion could be made it would not be 
100% accurate.

Infact, the termcap API the terminfo library has relies entirely on the 
application making no attempt at parsing the  returned strings.

The same functionality of $TERMCAP can be had by managing your own database of 
terminfo definitons via tic(1)

It should also be noted that no terminfo implementation I know of supports 
$TERMCAP for the above reasons either. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks

Roy