On Tue, May 16, 2000 at 03:48:13PM -0400, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Nope.  Those are two different classes of users.  One's at least a
> junior sys-admin with the root password, the other's just a shell user.
> 
> You don't need to be a superuser to set your terminal type and to
> provide the necessary terminal capabilities database entries, at least
> not on any Unix or unix-like system I've ever used....

Sure, so anybody can switch from vt220 to wsvt25 if he wants the extra
features. But stay with the more general type default.

> By necessity all terminfo systems have the tool(s) necessary to do the
> conversions (captoinfo, infocmp).  Certainly this issue raises the bar a
> bit, but nothing anyone capable of reading a manual page should have any
> trouble with.  It's quite likely that the remote system's administrator
> would be willing to help too, though of course this is where politics
> enters the picture!  ;-)
> 
> Except for a few weird and site-specific exceptions I've never seen any
> base vendor-supplied system software that required one to have both
> terminfo and termcap databases available simultaneously (at least not
> within any given "universe" -- Pyramid's dual universe system faithfully

I think on a NetBSD machine with a few ncurses-dependant packages installed
you need both, don't you ?

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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