From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Jan 16 23: 1:11 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from canonware.com (dsl081-058-209.sfo1.dsl.speakeasy.net [64.81.58.209]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 348B337B402 for ; Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:01:05 -0800 (PST) Received: by canonware.com (Postfix, from userid 1001) id 80914BA; Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:05:52 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:05:52 -0800 From: Jason Evans To: arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: termcap versus terminfo Message-ID: <20020116230552.O451@canonware.com> References: <20020116165926.N451@canonware.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <20020116165926.N451@canonware.com>; from jasone@canonware.com on Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 04:59:26PM -0800 Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 04:59:26PM -0800, Jason Evans wrote: > Are there any good reasons for not making this change? A NetBSD developer I was chatting with this evening pointed out that terminfo is not extensible in a portable manner, since the compiled terminfo files use a pre-defined structure, where each element corresponds to a particular capability. While this doesn't make the compiled format useless, it does make portable access of vendor extensions (non-standard capability keys) more or less impossible. termcap doesn't have this problem. Interestingly, he also mentioned that NetBSD developers have continued to work on the original BSD curses code, and they have implemented the majority of the extensions documented in SUSv2 at this point. Jason To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message