SCO's curses

[Ronald S H Khoo]

wht at n4hgf.Mt-Park.GA.US (Warren Tucker) writes:

> >		addch(0243);
> >I expect a pound sign on an ISO Latin 1 terminal, or a u-acute
> >on a PC console.

> The bits above the 0x80 bits are attribute bits in 3.2 curses
> and include blink, underline and color.

Yes, but 0243 does not have bits 0x80 or above set.  The problem is
apparently not SCO's fault, but that AT&T's curses has a bug in
waddch which causes sign propagation into the attribute bits :-(

SCO's workaround (thanks for the mail!  - SCO have some very good people
who read this list and help with mail answers.) is to recast your code
in terms of addstr() which apparently doesn't have this problem.  (I
haven't tried this approach)

My fix, like yours, is to go back to termcap curses.  The good news
is that termcap curses comes with *source* (on the 4.3 reno freed
files collection) so I'm adding the ACS_ stuff and maybe colour to it
as well as making it 8 bit clean.

Small bugs bite hard when you don't get source -- I don't have the
skill to binary patch buggy libraries in a cost-effective timeframe.
This is not a fault of the existing vendors, but of the market as a whole.
Does anyone have a patch to fix this ?
-- 
Ronald Khoo <ronald at robobar.co.uk> +44 81 991 1142 (O) +44 71 229 7741 (H)