In article <Pine.SOL.3.91.950829115534.896Y-100000@paddington>,
David Brownlee  <D.K.Brownlee@city.ac.uk> wrote:
> 	Are there any plans to move NetBSD to ncurses?
> 	Given that 4.4 curses is officially obsolete (according to
> 	the person who mainatined it :), and ncurses has a BSD like

According to The Linux Journal 9/95 (hey! put down those clubs, it
was an unsolicited sample copy! really! :->) "Keith Bostic tested
ncurses with nvi, and has officially pronounced the old BSD curses dead.
This means that ncurses will become the official standard curses for
Linux, as well as for the myriad free versions of BSD Unix".

> 	The only real problem I can see is the fact it runs on terminfo
> 	by default rather than termcap (and its termcap use is... shall
> 	we say, suboptimal - intentionally I believe to encourage people
> 	to use terminfo). So either NetBSD would have to move across
> 	to terminfo (cue another holy war, but as long as it provides
> 	the library interface to both types, quelle problem? :), or ncurses

I don't see problem with this really, since there are
termcap<-->terminfo converson tools already.

> 	So.. should NetBSD move to ncurses? and if so how?
> 	If it will involve any work, is anyone working on it, and if not
> 	should I have a go & submit any changes?

I know people have ported ncurses to NetBSD already (but I don't know
which versions) in order to suppport apps that need features missing
from old curses.

ncurses is supposed to now have better optimization than BSD curses,
support all the SysV curses features (multiple highlight, color, pads,
etc), and even have a clone of the SVR4 panels library. It's under a
BSD-like copyright (I guess). I vote yes!