Date: Mon, 29 May 2006 00:46:22 -0600 From: Stephen Hurd <shurd@sasktel.net> To: Matthew Seaman <m.seaman@infracaninophile.co.uk> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Custom termcap entries and installworld Message-ID: <447A98BE.6030700@sasktel.net> In-Reply-To: <447A94BA.9000302@infracaninophile.co.uk> References: <004101c6810c$edeeaaf0$5200a8c0@backoffice> <447A8B42.2060901@sasktel.net> <447A94BA.9000302@infracaninophile.co.uk>
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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.
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