I should have make it clear that my primary interest is in
internetworking.  Even a late-1980s telnet can and does automagically
propagate a TERMCAP string --one *I* can specify -- from my local
machine to anywhere I choose to telnet.  I don't know any good way to
do this with terminfo.  If there was a way to do this, I'd be happier
with terminfo.

I think it's an issue of control. Who has the opportunity to specify
what the capabilities of my terminal actually are, given its $TERM
name: me, or just some remote sysadmin?  Termcap says both
can. Terminfo says only the latter.  I should've made that distinction
clear earlier.

My experience in a university/research environment is that this is a
real issue, when using telnet or rlogin to some system that doesn't
have a terminfo or termcap entry for the device I happen to be
using. There are sysadmins out there that never update whatever
terminfo/termcap databese the vendor ships.

If someone wanted to add the ability to parse and use TERMCAP
environment variables to terminfo, I'd probably be happy to use it.
The compiler-based terminfo design doesn't seem to make that easily
doable without burying a termcap-to-terminfo translator *and* a
terminfo compiler into the terminfo library.

Is a hashed-termcap-databse-with-4k-buffer completely out of the question?
Would termcap strings longer than bytes break too many other termcap libraries?
Unless it's a transient error, the existing pcvt entry seems to suggest not... 

--Jonathan