Re: [vile] Wrong background colour in vile

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, 18 Jul 2006, Thomas Dickey wrote:

> On Tue, 18  2006, address@hidden wrote:
>
> > I'm being silly!  The problem isn't on this system (which is also new
> > to me) but on the BSD system where I had trouble getting vile to
> > build.
> >
> > On that system there isn't an 'infocmp' command.  There is terminfo
> > but I can't see any tool to extract terminal settings from the
> > terminfo data.
>
> ok.  There's no infocmp (someday perhaps - I'd like to, but there keep coming 
> up bigger bugs).  It's still ncurses underneath, but dressed up as termcap - 
> with the termcap data stored in a hashed database file.

To explain better - FreeBSD doesn't use the terminal descriptions that I 
maintain as part of ncurses.  Instead, they use a termcap file that was 
generated from an old copy of ncurses (and contained a lot of technical 
defects), and has been manually updated ad hoc for various descriptions. 
I'm reasonably familiar with the differences for xterm's entries, but the 
others - have to go back and read the actual data.

The termcap data is stored in a db 1.85 hashed database.  The record 
format is undocumented (there's only a C source-file that is the 
reference).  db's format itself is nonportable (you cannot copy a database 
to another platform and reuse it there).  Newer versions of db have 
problems with the licensing.

It-would-be-nice to modify ncurses to be able to read/write comparable 
db-files, for various technical reasons.

I'm aware that OpenBSD also uses a similar scheme - with all of the 
drawbacks listed above.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net