On Sat, 7 Dec 1996, Scott Reynolds wrote:

> > Any guesses on this one?
> > 
> > % snake
> > Terminal must have `bs' or `bc' capability
> > %
> 
> It's likely that the termcap file is missing information.  I've checked
> into this a little (for an unrelated problem) and it doesn't appear that
> we're at fault here, but rather that the terminfo database that is used to
> generate the termcap file is missing information (or is incorrectly
> parsed).

I have a book checked out on termcap & terminfo from 1988, and it says
that both those were obxolete even back then.  bc= is a similar terminfo
entry, though bs is simply boolean.  The book says, WRT the bs command:

"There is no terminfo capability directly equivalent to bs, so it is
considered obsolete by terminfo and by BSD 4.3 termcap.  In place of the
capability, terminfo would explicitly define CTRL-H as the string to send
the cursor left (cull=^H)."

This jives with what I've seen in logs of raw output (typescript) from
other boxes.  When they delete a character, they send ^H ^H with that
space in between to overwrite the previous letter.

Out of curiosity, I checked, and both MkLinux and SunOS 5.x contain bs in
their termcap files, and so does puma's (OpenBSD) termcap file, so perhaps
that _should_ be tweaked, even if it is essentially unnecessary anymore.
However, this does make me wonder how long it has been since the authors
of snake actually updated their termcap support.... :-)  (What is snake,
anyway?)

Later,

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