Re: terminfo vs termcap

[Julian Coleman <jdc%coris.org.uk@localhost>]

Hi,

> So I looked into what we have, and I think we can do quite a bit by 
> providing libterminfo to read the terminfo db's and provide termcap 
> compat functions and a basic tic compiler to convert termcap(5) and 
> terminfo(5) sources into terminfo.dbs. curses(3) would have to be 
> re-tooled around libterminfo of course.

I did wonder about creating a terminfo compatible part of our libterm.  This
would allow us to support those extra terminfo calls that are not in the
current libterm.  The most useful one to me was tparm().

I was thinking of still using termcap as the back end.  Basically, the
compatible part would have a mapping between terminfo and termcap
capabilities.  For example, if you called:

  tigetstr("cud");

it would translate internally to:

  t_getstr(tc, "DO", NULL, l);

(Functions without a termcap mapping would be extra).  That wouldn't involve
any changes to the curses library.

Thanks,

J

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