Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:11150 comp.unix.aux:598
Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!uw-june!mckenzie
From: mckenzie@june.cs.washington.edu (Neil McKenzie)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.aux
Subject: terminfo vs. termcap
Keywords: Why do we need two different terminal capability widgets?
Message-ID: <6966@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 89 03:19:09 GMT
Reply-To: mckenzie@uw-june.UUCP (Neil McKenzie)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 24

I've just brought up X11 on A/UX (MacII).  It works just fine, except that
there was no terminal description for "xterm".  So I thought, no big
deal, just ftp over /etc/termcap from another machine.  Imagine
to my surprise that it didn't work.  I realized that there was something
fishy, and stumbled onto terminfo, which is the SysV (and therefore A/UX)
way of doing things.

This is really dumb.  It is really mysterious why there is even an
/etc/termcap file and even a man page to go with it because the
termcap file is just ignored.  What is even more unfriendly is that
the source descriptions are compiled into an unreadable format.  This
makes it very hard to study examples, since the source formats seem
to be unavailable (or just well hidden), and reading the binary
is no help.

I've tried to construct a terminfo file from the termcap file, but
it doesn't quite work right, but it looks ok.

So, can someone post a terminfo source file for xterm?  Or, are there
source examples to study (such as vt100 which is pretty close to xterm)?

--Neil McKenzie, doomed to a life of finding incompatable parts
and putting them together.
mckenzie@june.cs.washington.edu