@MIT-MC.ARPA:usenet@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (10/30/85)
From: nbires!boulder!cisden!lmc@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Lyle McElhaney) To: info-terms@mit-mc.arpa Pet peeve time: Many newer terminals have features that didn't exist back when Mark Horton first (or even the second or third time) wrote termcap. When it was young, it seems to have experienced growth and change (witness the obsolete functions that still exist). However, over what appears to be the last 5 years or so the capability repertoire has been frozen. Doug Gwynn has told me in the past that new entries to the "official" termcap repertory are not being made in order to keep termcap compatible with terminfo. With all due respect, there is another possibility allowed by that argument: change terminfo too. The whole idea of termcap was to provide a common interface to all the terminals available; it is easy to see how termcaps could be constructed to cover these newer terminal features, but it seems to never get done. Nuts, I don't care if anyone uses the conventions that I established (for my own programs) to use line- drawing character sets; I just wish that there were some common place where they were accepted (rejected) and thereafter appeared in termcaps where they are applicable. Then I wouldn't feel guilty about using Gs/Ge in a program without adding 30 lines of comments to explain it all. While I'm at it, wouldn't it be nice if termcap.... ...looked for an entry in ~.termcap before running off to /etc/termcap? ...set BUFSIZ to 2048 rather than 1024? ...edited out redundancies from the termcap entries (to make them smaller, barring the 2048 BUFSIZ mentioned above)? ...had a way of saying, essentially, that rs is the same string as is (for example)? This could certainly be done by convention, by saying in some authoritative way that rs defaults to is if is is not given, but tset (for one) doesn't use that rule, and therefore it isn't followed. I guess that I want a software way in termcap to enforce defaults. And now that I've finished knocking everything, I'll say that I'm posting to mod.sources a program which I knocked together to provide termcap capabilities to shell programs. It, for example, would clear the screen given the command "tc cd", turn on an auxilliary printer given "tc po", and place the cursor in the middle of the screen given "tc cm 11 39". More on all of the above later. Lyle McElhaney ....cisden!lmc