On Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 12:52:37AM +0100, Aaron Sloman wrote:
> Steve, Waldek,
>
> Many thanks for looking into these issues.
>
> I've started looking briefly at the problems and have read your messages.
>
> Until tonight I did not know this, from 'man termcap'
>
> The termcap database is an obsolete facility for describing the
> capabilities of character-cell terminals and printers. It is
> retained only for capability with old programs; new programs should
> use the terminfo(5) database and associated libraries.
>
> I presume this implies a need to replace all uses of termcap in poplog with
> terminfo.
I do not think so. Basicaly, terminfo offers superset of termcap
capabilities and for best terminal support using native terminfo
may be better. However, existing terminfo libraries offer also
termcap compatible interface. I am not sure if termcap
compatibility is part of current Unix standards (teminfo is),
but this support is likely to be available for long time.
So, I would consider using native terminfo operations as
low priority cleanup task. The only thing affecting Poplog
now is name of the library, on Linux terminfo is part of
ncurses library.
FYI, termcap database used to be stored in a file and some
programs accessed direcly this file. Terminfo uses quite
different database. Direct access to termcap database
(file) is no longer supported. All access should go via
library functions. Poplog only uses library calls, which
is OK.
--
Waldek Hebisch
