Subject: Re: gcc can't find termcap library

From: [email-masked] (Bruce Perens)
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 96 10:38 PDT

Tell me where the source for "scilab" is, and I will remove its termcap
dependence. I'm a reasonably competent ncurses programmer.

Supporting two terminal management mechanisms would not be a good idea.

	Bruce

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From: "Susan G. Kleinmann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Sep 1996 14:27:23 -0400

Hi Bruce --
> Supporting two terminal management mechanisms would not be a good idea.

It would probably be a good idea to remind folks (in the FAQ or wherever)
about the rationale for using curses vs. termcap.  I tried to find one
using AltaVista and DejaNews, but I'll bet you can guess what a snowstorm
of "information" that yielded.  I understand that ncurses provides more
support for shared libraries (than curses), but that's all I could find 
so far.  Any additional pointers would be helpful.

Also, I'm guessing that we'll need to edit the FAQ to give far more
complete answers re: how-to-compile-or-use-termcap.  I don't know the
answers to this yet.  (My eyes tend to glaze over when anyone starts to
talk about compilers.)  If you have any specific suggestions, I'd be
happy to incorporate them.  Else, I'll make a general plea for help when
I get to this part of the FAQ again.

Cheers,
Susan

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From: Ed Donovan <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Sep 96 17:45 EDT

Hi Susan, 

> so far.  Any additional pointers would be helpful.

I could certainly use some more education on the ncurses/terminfo vs.
curses/termcap usage issues, but you could draw on the reasons in the
ncurses documentation--in /usr/doc/ncurses-dev, and on the web at

	http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ncurses.html
and	http://ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov:81/ltpcf/about/unix/Depotdoc/ncurses/ 

(I don't know if the second one's canonical.)

These are the parts that say the whole combination's more powerful, and
curses and termcap are supposed to be on the way out.  They don't say
that the binary terminfo files are much faster than the ascii termcap
definitions; I don't know where I've been reading that, sorry.

>From the announce:

 "The ncurses library is a freeware emulation of System V Release 4.0
curses. It uses terminfo format, supports color and multiple highlights
and forms characters, and function-key mapping, and has all the other
SYSV-curses enhancements over BSD curses.

   In mid-June 1995, the maintainer of 4.4BSD curses declared that he
considered 4.4BSD curses obsolete, and is encouraging the keepers of
Unix releases such as BSD/OS, freeBSD and netBSD to switch over to
ncurses."

And from the ncurses intro:

 "System III UNIX from Bell Labs featured a rewritten and much-improved
curses library. It introduced the terminfo format. Terminfo is based on
Berkeley's termcap database, but contains a number of improvements and
extensions. Parameterized capabilities strings were introduced, making
it possible to describe multiple video attributes, and colors and to
handle far more unusual terminals than possible with termcap. In the
later AT&T System V releases, curses evolved to use more facilities and
offer more capabilities, going far beyond BSD curses in power and
flexibility."

hth?

I think I'll be posting my own latest ncurses compilation question soon
:-)

-- 
Ed Donovan				[email-masked]

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From: Evan Thomas <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 1996 11:13:01 +1000

> Supporting two terminal management mechanisms would not be a good idea.
I agree two terminal management would be bad. However, I want to use an
application -- GENESIS <http://www.bbb.caltech.edu/GENESIS/> which
actually crashes when using ncurses. It gets a segmentation fault in
tgetent().

The program works fine under several other UNIXs, on other Linux
distributions and even works when linked against libtermcap.a (by using
the aout development package). I have been reluctant to report it as a
bug because: a) I can't reproduce the problem with a simple test
program, b) I know nothing about terminal programming and c) I can't
answer questions about the GENESIS source.

I have been corresponding with GENESIS support but I think it is unfair
to ask them to fix what appears to be a bug in ncurses termcap
compatibility. On the other hand I doubt the program is of sufficent
general interest to warrant a special Debian version/package.

The point I am trying to make is that it may be necassary to support two
terminal packages, at least for the time being.

Thanks Evan.

PS. Although this comes across as a complaint, I think Debian Linux is
an outstanding achievment.
--
Evan Thomas
Department of Anatomy & Cell Biology
University of Melbourne
Parkville, 3052
ph: 9344-5849  fax: 9347-5219