On Sun, Feb 09, 2020 at 12:52:00PM +0100, [email protected] wrote:
> Hi,
> does anybody know, why termcap/terminfo support is disabled in
> poplog?
>
> In pop/src/syscomp/x86_64/sysdefs.p it says 'No longer sets
> TERMINFO for
> Linux' and the same is the case in several other files.
I was not there when it happened, so just a guess: portability
problems. At that time some systems had real terminfo library,
other declared it obsolete and provided 'ncurses' instead.
This is actually current problem: some systems ship
'ncurses5' some ship 'ncurses6'. Once you link to ncurses
it is impossible to have binary that runs on all reasonably
current Linux systems. For Poplog V16 this is resolved in
following way: corepop is linked in a bit hackish way so
that it works without ncurses. Once you rebuild Poplog
liner will link to version of ncurses library provided by
the system, so Poplog will run fine on the same machine.
But if you transfer binary to another machine which has
different ncurses version it will no longer work (of
course rebuilding will cure the problem, provided you
have corepop which does not depend on ncurses).
> I reenabled it and removed the conditional test in
> pop/ved/src/vdinitseq.p:
>
> #_IF not(DEF LINUX)
> elseif testdef vedtermcapscreen then
> weakref vedtermcapscreen(name);
> #_ENDIF
>
> and it works without problems so far.
>
> Positive effect: If using a different terminal emulator then
> xterm,
> which doesn't set its TERM variable to xterm like e.g. urxvt
> (TERM=3Drxvt-unicode-256color) or many other terminals like
> alacritty,
> kitty etc. poplog does no longer ask about the terminal type when
> starting up, because there is a termcap/terminfo entry for these
> terminals (mostly identical to xterm).
>
> What was the reason for disabling it? I can see no problems so
> far.
> Everything works as expected.
I did few test several years ago and it worked fine. But
I did only few tests. There is a change: Poplog used to
roll its own emulation of termcap, which did not keep up
with changing environment. AFAIK now it uses system library.
Apparently others had less motivation for testing other bits
were not enabled.
--
Waldek Hebisch
