From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Jan 16 23:25:54 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from hawk.prod.itd.earthlink.net (hawk.mail.pas.earthlink.net [207.217.120.22]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 60B1C37B416 for ; Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:25:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from pool0014.cvx22-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net ([209.179.198.14] helo=mindspring.com) by hawk.prod.itd.earthlink.net with esmtp (Exim 3.33 #1) id 16R6vj-0002JJ-00; Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:25:47 -0800 Message-ID: <3C467C45.2D7A3381@mindspring.com> Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:24:53 -0800 From: Terry Lambert X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD {Sony} (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Jason Evans Cc: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: termcap versus terminfo References: <20020116165926.N451@canonware.com> <20020116230552.O451@canonware.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Jason Evans wrote: > > On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 04:59:26PM -0800, Jason Evans wrote: > > Are there any good reasons for not making this change? > > A NetBSD developer I was chatting with this evening pointed out that > terminfo is not extensible in a portable manner, since the compiled > terminfo files use a pre-defined structure, where each element corresponds > to a particular capability. While this doesn't make the compiled format > useless, it does make portable access of vendor extensions (non-standard > capability keys) more or less impossible. termcap doesn't have this > problem. One of the same objections I raised... BSD minds think alike... 8-) > Interestingly, he also mentioned that NetBSD developers have continued to > work on the original BSD curses code, and they have implemented the > majority of the extensions documented in SUSv2 at this point. It's worth looking at; I think that abstracting the capability code from the ncurses code would be a good idea, if it could be done, though, since t's so widely used and active maintained, so let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message