Subject: Re: bug#13471: 24.3.50; S-up does not work in xterm: <select> is undefined

From: Thomas Dickey <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 05:38:40 -0500

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:28:22AM +0100, Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Thomas Dickey <[email-masked]> writes:
> 
> > Looking at AIX 5, there is no termcap file,
> 
> Why do you need a termcap file?

You don't _need_ a termcap file, but for instance the presence of
a termcap file on Solaris was the cause of analogous user confusion
leading to incorrect patches.

> > the manpage for terminfo does not mention the names used for the
> > second parameter,
> 
> Does it support tgetstr?

There's a manpage for tgetstr, which states that it is used for
applications which use the termcap file.

However, tgetstr is implemented in the curses library,
which does not use termcap.

(I did ports to AIX 3 and 4 a while back, and from that and notes
am reasonably aware of their issues - it's been quite a while since
someone defended AIX 4 as being current - perhaps ten years).
 
> > and "strings" on the curses library shows no plausible tables
> > containing those strings.
> 
> The termcap translation table can be arbitrarily encoded.  libncurses
> doesn't contain those literal strings either.

If it's not in the AIX curses library, it won't be recognized by that
implementation - it relies upon a table, not upon an external user-supplied
definition of any kind whatsoever.

ncurses uses a different method, not used by any of the vendor unixes.
Furthermore, there is no point in bringing extensions which could be
defined by a user for ncurses into a topic which deals with "IBM terminfo".

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <[email-masked]>
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net