termcap

[Frank Van Uffelen]

> There is a small termcap included in the minimal.tar package. However,
> I found that the terminal descriptions in it are too minimal for a
> system administered via telnet from a variety of systems.

telnet uses vt100 emulation, so adding that one and maybe a vt220 
in the minimal termcap will solve most problems.  I'll send you a 
suggested replacement for the minimal termcap.
But the size of termcap is a symptom of the real problem : it really 
looks like the creators of terminals considered it a status symbol 
to design a new command set, thereby forcing those maintaing 
termcap to let the terminal description database grow with each 
released product.
 
> I tried ncurses but found it much harder to shrink in size then
> termcap. One of the future plans for PeeWeeLinux is to include means
> to create all the packages from the sources by using patch files.
> Perhaps at that point it might be an idea to give a choice of
> compiling with termcap or ncurses? Still got to checkout this upx
> thing, though...

I'm afraid it goes a lot deeper than that. As termcap does not 
support color and other advanced features you'll have a hard time 
compiling stuff that can use eg color with another, termcap-based 
curses.  On the other hand it's much easier to borrow the terminfo 
definitions of those few terminals you're interested in (just find them 
in the correct /usr/lib/terminfo subdir and copy it over to the target 
file system) than with termcap (where you take the full file and edit 
it down to the required subset).  The former makes much more 
sense to me.




Frank Van Uffelen
fvu@nfe.be
Please note : my @tornado.be address ceased to exist end of '98!
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