> Let's not turn this into a rerun of a flamwar...

I have no intention of doing so. :)

> >termcap@berkeley is dead.  termcap is generated from the terminfo master
> >sources these days, and are in effect stripped-down terminfo entries
> >which has the capability names and encoding of format strings translated.
> 
> Sorry, my braino.  Thanks for pointing it out.  Actually, there still
> seem to be references to it in the NetBSD tree, which might have
> something to do with my idiotic mistake.   otherwise, it sounds like
> termcap and terminfo are largely fungible, modulo over-long capability
> strings.

Yes, they are.  And the NetBSD termcap.src is generated from the terminfo
database nowadays too.

I believe a few bugs were fixed in the conversion software the maintainer
uses to generate the termcap format file after the NetBSD import, which
may reduce the number of entries which are >1024 bytes; I seem to remember
something about that on the ncurses mailing list some time back.

> Last I heard, terminfo didn't have a reasonable replacement for
> the TERMCAP environment variable.  I'd appreciate an update if that's
> now out-of-date.

This is also true.  The one thing you can do is maintain your own
private database in a directory tree ~/.terminfo, but that is hardly
as nice as having just a single TERMCAP variable.  However, the rest of
the world is moving towards terminfo, so...

> >terminfo is not limited to two-character capability names.
> 
> Personally I don't find _either_ terminfor or termcap names
> particularly human-readable.  I don't see the validity in choosing an
> implementation (termcap vs terminfo) based on the length of cryptic
> capabilities.  As long as curses and emacs  and vi work, who cares? :)

Agreed.  The capability strings as used in code are typically much more
readable in terminfo tho; however if you have old programs with long
variable names you may have problems converting over since the terminfo
variables as defined in <term.h> are not protected in any way.

Thorsten
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