Re: Help with libcurses and lynx under NetBSD-9 and -current?

[Brett Lymn <blymn%internode.on.net@localhost>]

On Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 02:28:08PM +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> On 01/02/2021 09:53, Brett Lymn wrote:
> > The TERMCAP variable has some severe liitations, the worst being it can
> > only be 256bytes in size which was more than adequate for a vt100
> > definition but a modern colour xterm definition simply won't fit in that
> > space, terminfo does not have these limitations.
> 
> Are you sure about that?

Reasonably, well apart from it being 1024 bytes not 256, my bad.
In the glory days of termcap there was a hard limit to the
capability entry.  Some really bad programs would just allocate a fixed
1024 byte array and did an unbounded read of the entry, others would just
read the first 1024 bytes and then capabilities would be missing.  I did
try and fix this by modifying libtermcap to hold the whole capability
but only return a 256byte max entry.  For programs that used the
libtermcap routines to query for capabilities they would query against
the untruncated version.  Unfortunately, things like window and screen
that took $TERMCAP and rewrote it that didn't work so well.  Actually I
looked up the termcap on wikipedia and it mentions the extension I
made... didn't realise that.

> I don't think libterminfo imposes any length on $TERMCAP other than those
> translating to terminfo.
> 

Absolutely no question that you are doing the right thing... 
I was just concerned that people are digging up something old and crusty
as some sort of work around and unwittingly shooting themselves in the
foot (perhaps)

> 
> Why don't you post your $TERMCAP and infocmp output here?
> 

Umm I don't have a problem with using terminfo.  I am more interested in
working out why lynx is misbehaving in window.  I suspect that is
something I did wrong when I fixed another PR to do with the input
routines not preserving the cursor location.

-- 
Brett Lymn
--
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