Date: Fri, 12 Apr 1996 12:03:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Keith Bostic <bostic@bsdi.com> To: mike.long@analog.com Cc: current@FreeBSD.org, ncurses-list@netcom.com Subject: Re: terminfo-less ncurses Message-ID: <199604121603.MAA13184@mongoose.bostic.com>
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> All that aside, I don't think it should matter which of the two
> description formats you use. Zeyd and Eric think termcap sucks;
> that's their opinion. Many BSD users disagree, and *WILL* *NOT* *USE*
> ncurses unless it can use termcap instead of terminfo, no matter what
> Bostic has said.
Ummmm, Bostic has been trying to remain resolutely silent on
the issue, and he's certainly NOT made any statements about
termcap. My only goal was get rid of the 4BSD version of curses
-- its internal structure and some of its internal algorithms
are poor. Whether that was done with termcap or terminfo makes
no difference to me, although having terminfo support is good
because it makes System V applications more portable to the free
systems.
Regardless, I was one of the people working to convince the
ncurses maintainers to support both terminfo and termcap
equally. And, as far as I know, the ncurses distribution now
supports them both, and since Eric used the Berkeley code,
it's going to be as fast as the historic implementations.
I think the arguments are somewhat pointless -- since ncurses
supports both, we can all use what we like. My guess is that
BSDI will convert to terminfo in our base release because it's
more powerful, but you can bet anything you want that we'll not
break support for the user's local termcap files.
Finally, I don't think it's worth extending termcap to support
the rest of the terminfo capabilities. It seems as if that
would make make termcap files less portable to other systems,
and I don't see any strong reason to do so.
--keith
bostic@bsdi.com
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