Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!att!rutgers!ucsd!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: Xterm , 8 bit international fonts and font editor
Message-ID: <2641@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 17 Nov 89 00:02:53 GMT
References: <8911140606.AA06591@Larry.McRCIM.McGill.EDU>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 23

>Think about it for a minute.  What's the difference between emulating
>an obscure but real terminal and "emulating" a nonexistent terminal?

The first may be in the "termcap"/"terminfo"/whatever database on some
remote system you log into, while the second may not be - and you may
not have control over the remote system.

This is more "what's the difference between emulating something
commonly found in 'termcap' and something you've just invented", as you
could emulate some non-existent terminal that may be fairly commonly
available in "term*" (e.g., "xterm") or some terminal that exists but
that nobody who bothers to make "term*" entries has ever heard of.

Yes, this has bitten me; it's a nuisance to rlogin from within a
"termulator" window, since none of the machines around here have "tm19"
in their "term*" databases.  (Yes, in this particular case, you can
probably chalk the problems off to laziness on my part, but I don't
think you can generalize that to all cases - were I at a big company
with lots of machines, it might not be possible to get everybody to
upgrade their "term*" databases, and were we on the Internet, it might
not be possible to get some remote site to upgrade their databases. 
There are workarounds, but I *am* fundamentally lazy and prefer having
the computer do things automagically for me whenever possible....)