Move from termcap(5) to terminfo(5)

Baptiste Daroussin bapt at FreeBSD.org
Thu May 7 13:24:37 UTC 2020


On Thu, May 07, 2020 at 03:22:20PM +0200, Mateusz Piotrowski wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 5/7/20 2:41 PM, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> > Hello everyone,
> > 
> > I can't find any proper rationale in our history (maybe I missed it) which
> > explains why our ncurses is stuck on using termcap(5) instead of terminfo(5)
> > Except an argument in the Makefile that builds ncurses:
> > "Used instead of the hideous read_termcap.c abomination."
> > 
> > Which I do not find really useful.
> > 
> > I would like to make the move from termcap to terminfo which would give us the
> > bonus to be able to track terminfo sources from upstream aka ncurses and to
> > add and use tic(1).
> That's great! I've been bitten by termcap not being well understood by the
> open source community many times. I am supporting the move to terminfo
> wholeheartedly.
> > If you have some knowledge you want to share: "be careful about this or that" I
> > would be more than happy to collect it, to make sure the transition is as smooth
> > as possible.
> 
> What comes to my mind is that we should probably pay special attention to
> terminal ports, like x11/sterm. We might need to tell those ports to install
> their terminfo files. I don't remember the details though.
> 
All their terminfo files are already in recent ncurses, so we will have nothing
to do with them.

Best regards,
Bapt
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