On Mon, Feb 01, 2021 at 02:28:08PM +0000, Roy Marples wrote: > On 01/02/2021 09:53, Brett Lymn wrote: > > The TERMCAP variable has some severe liitations, the worst being it can > > only be 256bytes in size which was more than adequate for a vt100 > > definition but a modern colour xterm definition simply won't fit in that > > space, terminfo does not have these limitations. > > Are you sure about that?
Reasonably, well apart from it being 1024 bytes not 256, my bad. In the glory days of termcap there was a hard limit to the capability entry. Some really bad programs would just allocate a fixed 1024 byte array and did an unbounded read of the entry, others would just read the first 1024 bytes and then capabilities would be missing. I did try and fix this by modifying libtermcap to hold the whole capability but only return a 256byte max entry. For programs that used the libtermcap routines to query for capabilities they would query against the untruncated version. Unfortunately, things like window and screen that took $TERMCAP and rewrote it that didn't work so well. Actually I looked up the termcap on wikipedia and it mentions the extension I made... didn't realise that. > I don't think libterminfo imposes any length on $TERMCAP other than those > translating to terminfo. > Absolutely no question that you are doing the right thing... I was just concerned that people are digging up something old and crusty as some sort of work around and unwittingly shooting themselves in the foot (perhaps) > > Why don't you post your $TERMCAP and infocmp output here? > Umm I don't have a problem with using terminfo. I am more interested in working out why lynx is misbehaving in window. I suspect that is something I did wrong when I fixed another PR to do with the input routines not preserving the cursor location. -- Brett Lymn -- Sent from my NetBSD device. "We are were wolves", "You mean werewolves?", "No we were wolves, now we are something else entirely", "Oh"