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Date:      Wed, 16 Jan 2002 23:05:52 -0800
From:      Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>
To:        arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: termcap versus terminfo
Message-ID:  <20020116230552.O451@canonware.com>
In-Reply-To: <20020116165926.N451@canonware.com>; from jasone@canonware.com on Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 04:59:26PM -0800
References:  <20020116165926.N451@canonware.com>

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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

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