In message <v01540b00ad871a34b339@[205.199.253.82]>,
	Julian Bean writes:
>At 7:52 am 2/4/96, Jason Downs wrote:
>>In message <199604020121.RAA17420@netcom23.netcom.com>,
>>        J.T. Conklin writes:
>>>> There was talk of doing it right before 1.1 came out and is was decided,
>>>> I thought, that it would be done immediately after 1.1 since no one
>>>> wanted to introduce that large of a change at such a late date in the
>>>> release cycle.
>>>
>>>That was the plan, but IMO ncurses still isn't in good enough shape to
>>>integrate into NetBSD.  I am tracking ncurses development, submitting
>>>patches, etc.  It's getting better, and I plan on integrating it as
>>>soon as I feel it's "ready".
>>
>>ncurses is literally *filled* with messy code, and it's straight ANSI C.
>>
>>Going to ncurses would be more of a retreat for NetBSD then a move
>>forward.
>>
>
>Any better ideas then?
>
>The BSD curses maintainer has, apparently stopped.
>
>Do we maintain our own curses legacy?

Our current curses is fairly well written and clean; ncurses is more
advanced, but has a lot of really horrible and non-portable code.

The best thing would be to have a well written ncurses, but I doubt anyone
has the time to essentially rewrite it.

>From external structure terminfo would appear to be superior to termcap
>(correct me if I'm wrong), and we need something.  I have enough hassles
>making shells etc work on two fairly standard terminals, a Sun3 console and
>a Mac68k console.

terminfo is more advanced; no argument there.  I also believe that doing
something like SunbrokenOS and supporting two curses libraries with both
termcap and terminfo is a bad idea, but would be acceptable to going
completely over to ncurses.

>ncftp won't compile OOTB as a visual system because our curses is too old -
>I have a copy compiled against a static libncurses, which is no longer on
>my system

I would tend to argue that ncftp isn't very portable, in that case.

-- 
Jason Downs
downsj@teeny.org  --> teeny.org: Free Software for a Free Internet <--
http://www.teeny.org/
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