Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!bu-cs!madd
From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: terminfo
Message-ID: <24729@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: 3 Sep 88 19:21:41 GMT
References: <508@altos86.UUCP> <8377@smoke.ARPA> <1553@mcgp1.UUCP> <8412@smoke.ARPA>
Reply-To: madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost)
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: Boston University Distributed Systems Group
Lines: 28

In article <8412@smoke.ARPA> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
|In article <1553@mcgp1.UUCP> fst@mcgp1.UUCP (Skip Tavakkolian) writes:
|-In article <8377@smoke.ARPA>, gwyn@smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) writes:
|-> In article <508@altos86.UUCP> clp@altos86.UUCP (Chuck L. Peterson) writes:
|-> >Why does terminfo exist?
|-> Because termcap was too limited.
|-Please explain.

My vote is against terminfo.  I found several problems with the
supplied terminfo entries for the AT&T terminals (4435 I think)
attached to 3b2's running SysVr2, as well as on the DMD graphics
terminals.

I tried to fix the problems, but there was NO documentation on how to
do it, and the terminfo information is not in a format such that it
can be figured out in a reasonable amount of time.

Using termcap, I had some problems with the AT&T-supplied TERMCAP
entry but I editted the entry and all was well.  Similar problems with
X11's xterm program were remedied the same way.  The documentation was
easy to find, but was also unnecessary in both cases.

Perhaps terminfo is functionally "better", but my experience has shown
it to be much less "maintainable".  A broken "better" doesn't do much
good.

jim frost
adt!madd@bu-it.bu.edu