RE: Providing an alternative TERMINFO environment variable

[Igor Todorovski]

Thanks, NCURSES_TERMINFO makes sense.

 

Unfortunately, we can’t use the compiled-in location because on z/OS we don’t normally have root access and as such, the packages we provide need to be relocatable. That’s another reason why we use the environment variable.

 

Thanks,

Igor

 

On 2023-11-28, 4:43 PM, "Thomas Dickey" <dickey@his.com> wrote:

On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 05:14:26PM +0000, Igor Todorovski wrote:

> Hi,

>

> I’m an IBM z/OS mainframe developer. On z/OS, we have an existing TERMINFO db that is in EBCDIC format and z/OS already check for TERMINFO, but I would like to provide a way to override that with a different environment variable so as to instruct ncurses where to check for the ascii terminfo.

>

> I have added the below code to enable setting ASCII_TERMINFO. I’m not sure if the environment variable name is reasonable or not, but the z/OS system default checks for TERMINFO so I needed a way to tell ncurses where to pick up tis terminfo db.

>

> Is there a better alternative?

 

I suppose you could call it NCURSES_TERMINFO

 

However, this is used when writing terminfo data, and that normally would

be as root (or $HOME/.terminfo), and root's environment shouldn't be

cluttered with things like $TERMINFO -- generally speaking the compiled-in

value for $TERMINFO satisfies almost all uses.

 

>   /*

>    * Record the "official" location of the terminfo directory, according to

>    * the place where we're writing to, or the normal default, if not.

>    */

>   NCURSES_EXPORT(const char *)

>   _nc_tic_dir(const char *path)

>   {

>       T(("_nc_tic_dir %s", NonNull(path)));

>       if (!KeepTicDirectory) {

>     if (path != NULL) {

>         if (path != TicDirectory)

>       update_tic_dir(strdup(path));

>         HaveTicDirectory = TRUE;

>     } else if (HaveTicDirectory == 0) {

>         if (use_terminfo_vars()) {

>       const char *envp;

> + #ifdef __MVS__

> +     if ((envp = getenv("ASCII_TERMINFO")) != 0)

> +         return _nc_tic_dir(envp);

> +     if ((envp = getenv("TERMINFO")) != 0)

> + #else

>       if ((envp = getenv("TERMINFO")) != 0)

> + #endif

>           return _nc_tic_dir(envp);

>         }

>     }

>       }

>       return TicDirectory ? TicDirectory : TERMINFO;

>   }

 

--

Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>

https://invisible-island.net