Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.terminals
Subject: Re: TERMCAP / TERMINFO difference?
Message-ID: <4127@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 1 Oct 90 18:21:39 GMT
References: <24636@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <13983@smoke.BRL.MIL>
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 29

>Virtually all applications that use one or another of these facilities
>are built to use just one of them;

In particular, the SunOS 4.1 "vi" uses only "terminfo" (it's based on
the S5R3.1 "vi", mainly to pick up the support for 8-bit characters).

As for some of the original poster's other questions, in case he didn't
infer the answers from Doug's explanation:

> Information in the TERMCAP database seems to be almost duplicated by
> information in the TERMINFO database.  Why?  

Because some systems support both "termcap" and "terminfo", for various
reasons, and therefore have to supply both the "termcap" and "terminfo"
databases.

> How is TERMCAP-info kept synchronized with $TERMINFO-info?  Does it
> depend only on the diligence of the system administrator?

The system administrator and the vendor(s) involved.  Most of the
"termcap" entries in SunOS come from the BSD "termcap" file, and most of
the "terminfo" entries in SunOS come from the S5 distribution (4.3BSD
and System V Release 3.1, respectively, in SunOS 4.x).

At one point I looked into comparing the "termcap" database to the
"terminfo" database, but realized that I had no way of finding out
quickly what significance the differences had, if any; Sun has zillions
of various flavors of Wyse terminals, but it has few of any of the other
zillions of terminals in the databases.