[ On Saturday, April 24, 1999 at 22:29:27 (+0930), Brett Lymn wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: A solution for termcap lossage?
>
> Our curses is not dead.  It has just had somewhat of a face lift and
> will get more.

It is in a dead end with a steam roller rumbling towards it, even if
it's still kicking.  It's original author says so, and if you care to
take a look at what's in ncurses-4 these days you'll find you've many
man-years worth of work to even begin to catch up.  Let it lie in peace
and save your efforts for something more practical.  We *really* don't
need another slightly different "wheel" in this department.

> AFAIK ncurses integration is on hold.

That's too bad.  It probably wouldn't take much effort.

>  Changes to our curses has made
> the need for ncurses abate somewhat.

Only for trivial reasons.  All the real reasons still exist.

> That would be something that can be taken care of in the set up of the
> emulation environment - I don't see that our terminfo need be limited
> by this consideration at all.

Quite the contrary -- I run SunOS-4 binaries that were linked against
/usr/5lib/libcurses.a.  Sure, I can run all the old SunOS-4 crap to deal
with terminfo entries too, but that's silly if I can integrate all my
terminfo support into one database.  The same goes for other platforms
with binary compatability for systems that use terminfo.  Besides there
are many even more practical reasons to maintain the same format of
database, and very few real reasons to break binary compatability.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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