u31b3hs@cip-s02.informatik.rwth-aachen.de (Michael Haardt) (09/24/90)
Hello World! A few days ago, someone posted a real curses package for MINIX. It is a rewritten IBM-PC curses version. Unfortunately, the port has not finished. There are some PC dependecies, which I had to remove: The refresh was sloowwwww, espacially on a serial terminal. This was caused by a bug in the update routine. Only 80x25 screens were supported, because there were comments set around the termcap calls to fix a bug. The *bug* was a wrong use of the termcap calls! printw is very bad code, because it doesn't use stdarg. I changed it using vsprintf, but vfprintf is missing in my library. It this ok? In the earlier varargs.h there was a #define vfprintf _doprint. I wrote a vfprintf using _doprint because I don't want to change the whole library. In my opinion, this part of the library isn't ANSI yet. box used the IBM blockgrafic characters instead of using termcap. I rewrote this part to use termcap as, ae and ac, so that each terminal will use its own symbols, if there are some. This includes, that there is no more support for double lines around windows, but who cares. There were hard-coded escape sequences for making the cursor invisible instead of using ve and vi. I still have the original source, so that I can make cdiffs and post them, if someone is interested. I don't know, if I found all bugs, but it is a first step. If there is any interest, please *post* replies. Send no email, please!!! It can't pay it, if I will get more!!! I wrote a termcap manual which describes all the termcap capabilities I know. This could help to avoid hard-coded escape sequences, because one does not know the termcap names for them. This is *not* a flame, the curses package is really wonderful and seems to be complete. After removing the bugs, I said "wow" when I saw the demo program on my vt101 terminal. Michael Haardt P.S. The last time I posted an article, it arrives in comp.os.minix, but it was bounced by a compuserve server. I lost the adress, but I will sind email, if it happens again. English is not my native language... ------------------------------------------- ciao ----------------------------------------
unix3@ce.chalmers.se (Unix Internt. Labgrupp 3) (09/25/90)
It's true that vfprintf was missing (which vsprintf depends on too) and I mentioned this to Frank Meulenbroks who added my implementation via one of the 1.5.10 ST upgrades. If you for any reason want mine I'll send it to you via mail. The next version of Minix (V2) is supposed to have a complete new reworked stdio library or so I have been informed so I guess a proper vfprintf should be there then. (somewhat difficult to make proper implementations now, due to lacking return values from the subroutine primitives...) Yours, Andrew Olausson
brian@vdbsan.UUCP (Brian Bainter) (09/25/90)
I for one would like to see the fixes for the curses package. I also missed the first and third parts of the curses package which was sent a few days ago. If someone could help me to get these two installments (parts 1 and 3), I would be eternally greatfull. Thanks for all the efforts, Brian