Jim Fridlund  writes:
>der Mouse writes:
>> 
>> It's also got some ugly aspects, like the single-character
>> subdirectories into which the directory of entries is split up.  Or
>> that it has to be a directory, rather than a file....
>
> I thought that was rather odd myself, but there are some benefits with
> ncurses. One big plus is color!  A big advantage of spliting it in several
> files is that you don't have to parse one huge termcap file just to get
> window parameters for a particular terminal. It's not like all the files
> are all under one directory. There is a hierarchy (based on first character of
> the terminal name).  It's a trade off...

But surely the current termcap access scheme is quite quick given
that it is based on db files rather than the old flat file. I would
think that this would be quicker still than the files split
into directories. Providing that suitable tools
are provided to check in and out terminal descriptions. Why not have
a "tic" command that either checks the data directly into the db
file and also have another command that will dump either a single
terminal description or the complete file into a text based flat
file (I'm thinking here of a cron job to backup the termcap database)
Lets face it what we need is a database so why not use a database
file?

Just my \(Po0.02 worth!

Alex.