TERMINFO to TERMCAP conversion.

[Martin Weitzel]

In article <OHT2AIAxds13 at ficc.uu.net> peter at ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>In article <12538 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
[controverse arguments about TERMINFO and TERMCAP]

Just to add some of my experiences with TERMCAP here ...

One of our major german computer manufacturer, who pushed UNIX (alias SINIX)
into the german small systems market some years ago, used TERMCAP in
the following way: For nearly every software product that was available
for their UNIX-variant, there was a separate entry in the TERMCAP-file.
This was necessary, because the standard capabilities were not sufficient
(and IMHO also not well understood). It doesn't hurt them too much,
because they only suplied a certain (self manufactured) terminal type.

Of course, those customers who wanted to connect other terminal hardware
now had to update a multiple of TERMCAP-entries (assume 8 software
products, 5 terminal types = 40 TERMCAP-entries!). Most of the new
capabilities were undocumented ("why do you want to know the purpose,
with our terminals it will work"). Furthermore I am not at all sure
if all the software products did it completly in the "right" way.
There are some dark corners, especially if you want to handle the
wait-time specification at the start of string capabilities right.
Some products which I know in more detail took the approach: "Modern
terminals don't need wait-times, so why should we care ..." which of
course leaves the owners of older equipment standing out in the rain.

To draw the bottom line, it has its advantages that TERMINFO is *not*
user-extendable. As I would additionally recommend that new programs
should allways use curses, I don't see much need for extensions.
As Peter mentioned, all individual extensions will create the
problem, that the extensions of one manufacturer may collide with
the extensions of another one. In the case of TERMINFO there will
be extensions from AT&T (eg in SysV R3 they added a few graphic
shapes.) If one specific application program needs more individual
configuration (eg "logical to physical" key-mapping), it has allways
the option to store the information elsewhere.

NOTE: This was only *my* opinion, formed by earlier experiences
with the way some companies tended to use TERMCAP. In an ideal world,
things may have been handled in some other way and other conclusions
would apply ...
-- 
Martin Weitzel, email: martin at mwtech.UUCP, voice: 49-(0)6151-6 56 83