Custom termcap entries and installworld

[Stephen Hurd]

Matthew Seaman wrote:
> I think you're not going to have much luck here.  Custom termcap entries
> are not something that most FreeBSD users deal with and consequently there
> does not seem to be any useful mechanism established for managing them.
>   
Hrm... maybe if I raise a big enough stink termcap can be installed in 
/etc, managed by mergemaster, and everyone will go away happy... me 
because I have what I want and everyone else because I finalyl shut up.  ;-)
> The curses(3X) man page seems to be they key reference.  Particularly
> the section on environment variables: TERM, TERMCAP, TERMPATH.  It does
> also mention the possibility of using ${HOME}/.termcap to hold supplementary
> termcap entries. However, these man pages are rather confusing: many of them
> talk about terminfo(5) in terms of 'it is going to replace termcap(5) any
> day now'.  But terminfo(5) is a SysV-ism and supported only as a compatibility
> thing under FreeBSD.
>   
I'm fairly certain that anything the curses man pages have to say on the 
topic is wrong (and I dare you to read the terminfo manpage - it's been 
dead on my system for some time... but that's Ok, since it's not 
applicable).  I believe that *BSD is the only platform using termcap 
with ncurses left on the planet.  I use termcap(5) as my primary source, 
but have a firm belief that the last two thirds of the "CAVEATS AND 
BUGS" section is completely wrong.
> Most people will be perfectly happy with the default termcap database -- so
> long as it provides xterm / vt100 and cons25 almost all situations are covered.
>   
Yeah.
> For your purposes if using environment variables to achieve your ends turns out
> not to be workable, then I'd suggest keeping a backup copy of your customised
> termcap somewhere where system updates won't overwrite it -- keeping it
> in CVS or similar would be a good move -- and writing yourself a little
> script to merge in your changes to /usr/share/misc/termcap and then re-run
> 'cap_mkdb /usr/share/misc/termcap' after a system update.  I've a feeling that
> /etc/termcap is there mostly for historical compatibility now-adays.
>   
*nod* I've done a basic hack now and plastered stickynotes on all my 
systems with dumb terminals.  We'll see how well that system works out.  :-)

I haven't yet found a way to use env variables (and haven't futzed 
around with ~/.termcap yet) with entries in /etc/ttys I suspect it won't 
work but I won't know until I beat myself to death with them.