[net.sources.bugs] Public Domain Curses/Terminfo problems

urban@spp2.UUCP (01/08/85)

Well, I installed the terminfo/curses  11-part magnum opus on
our (4.2bsd) system and and compiled the "mille" test program.
There are two immediate problems:

1) It doesn't seem to handle Stop properly.  It redraws the
   screen but never pops back to the C-shell.  The "tstp"
   routine seems quite different from what's in the 4.2bsd
   distributed "curses"...

2) The resulting "mille" program is painfully, agonizingly,
   horribly slow compared to what's in /usr/games.  What
   on Earth is it *doing*?

This doesn't bode well.

	Mike

woof@psivax.UUCP (Harold Schloss) (01/08/85)

In article <340@spp2.UUCP> urban@spp2.UUCP (Mike Urban) writes:
>
>Well, I installed the terminfo/curses  11-part magnum opus on
>our (4.2bsd) system and and compiled the "mille" test program.
. . . . 
>2) The resulting "mille" program is painfully, agonizingly,
>   horribly slow compared to what's in /usr/games.  What
>   on Earth is it *doing*?

Have you considered the possibility that when it writes the trace file
that it runs a lot slower. Be sure to look at the trace file, and then
delete it. If you want to speed things up, try recompiling using the library
libncurses which is the normal terminfo library rather libdcurses which
is the debugging one!

-- 
		Hal Schloss
		(from the Software Lounge at) Pacesetter Systems Inc.
{trwrb|allegra|burdvax|cbosgd|hplabs|ihnp4|sdcsvax}!sdcrdcf!psivax!woof

mark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (01/14/85)

In article <7163@brl-tgr.ARPA> Jeff Dean <jeff@aids-unix> writes:
>Well, it looks like lots of us are having problems with
>the terminfo/curses distribution.  There seem to be a
>bunch of problems with mille just in terms of keeping
>track of things on the screen.  I found that with the
>terminfo version, the screen needs to be restored fairly
>often; I didn't have the same problem with the termcap
>version.

You didn't say what kind of terminal you have - chances are that
you have a terminal with an obscure property.

Pavel's version of curses is best considered a prototype.  It has
not had the 3 years of support that my curses has.  It is, however,
largely compatible, and in the public domain.  It is also very clean
code, when I needed to fix a couple of bugs, they were easy to find.
Finally, his terminfo compiler is much much better than mine, in fact,
I'm now using his.

If you have the System V Release 2 curses, you're probably better off
to use it.  If you don't have it but can easily get it (this probably
applies to universities, who can get an SVR2 source tape for almost
no money plus an infinite amount of time) it's worthwhile getting it.
However, if you don't expect to get the SVR2 curses soon, here's a
public domain implementation that works decently well.  It's probably
worth putting a little time into to make it work better.

	Mark