On Tue, 6 Aug 1996, Dieter Baron wrote:

> In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.960806095442.8450D-100000@artemis> you wrote:
> : On Wed, 31 Jul 1996, Jonathan Stone wrote:
> : I don't know much about terminfo, but have played with termcap(3,5).
> : I think termcap is a good system.
> : 
> : Wouldn't an easy solution to this problem be to add a new function to the
> : termcap interface, which allows one to measure the size of a termcap entry
> : keyed by the name of the terminal type. Thus, instead of giving a termcap 
> [...]
> : Increasing the buffer to 4K doesn't seem like a good idea to me, as this 
> : would probably mean that the same problem would occur again , sometime in 
> : the future ...
> : 
> : If anyone thinks this is a good idea or has other ideas about this, let 
> : me know, as I was thinking about fixing/re-writing termcap for my own 
> : reasons.
> 
> take a look at the gnu version of termcap, in it you can pass a NULL
> pointer as buffer arument and have the routine allocate an approriate
> buffer.  this is, i think, the way to go.

Yeh I've seen GNU termcap ...
It doesn't appear to be very well written though ... :(

Yep this is a good way to do it and solves the problem. I myself would 
prefer both facilities; being able to suck in a chunk of allocated 
termcap entry, or finding out the size of the termcap entry via a termcap 
interface and then filling up a (non-allocated) buffer... clearly having 
the latter allows one to implement the former.

> 
> yours,
> dillo
> 
>