Re: HEADS UP: terminfo imported into -current

[David Holland <dholland-current%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 11:19:54PM +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> I would suggest using infocmp(1) to grab the existing terminfo entry for  
> the terminal and adjust cols# and lines# accordingly, save to the file  
> and then compile it with tic(1).
>
> On the other hand, I do wonder just how useful that is in real world  
> applications as many terminals say cols#80, lines#24 when they're really  
> not that. Say like xterm or rxvt.

It's not useful, not now. The window size should be stored in the tty
driver; the means for doing so (the TIOCGWINSZ and TIOCSWINSZ ioctls)
have been standard and available for a long time. Back in say 1995 you
might still run into e.g. HPUX 9 that was (IIRC) missing such
functionality, but that was a long time ago.

Anything short of a genuine terminal on a serial port can and should
just provide the right window size that way, and any alleged size data
should be purged from the terminal databas. For real terminals,
there's tset.

In the unlikely event we run across some non-curses program so old
it's still never heard of TIOCGWINSZ, patching is easy.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost