Re: LYNX-DEV Development code ac-28 comments

[Hiram Lester, Jr.]

On Sun, 8 Jun 1997, T.E.Dickey wrote:

> If ncurses is installed as the default curses, you don't afaik, need the
> option (if not, that's a bug).  You use options to look for the non-default
> behavior (otherwise we'll get into a discussion of what should be done if
> the configure script looks around & finds both ncurses & slang installed ;-).

Yeah, I thought of this.  I guess my point is that if ncurses is available
and the default as on Linux, then it should automatically assume ncurses,
and it didn't on both targets I tried it on.  It *DID* detect ncurses with
just plain old 'configure' becaues it printed something like 'ncurses
version... 1.9.9e' and suggested upgrading.  When I had 4.1 installed, it
detected 4.1 and didn't complain.  However, it still defaulted to
screen=curses.  As I mentioned, on the Red Hat system this caused it to
get to the point in the configure script: 'Seeing if -lcurses works...'.
At which point it discovered that it didn't and quit.  On my slackware
system, it got to the linking stage of the make and then pointed out all
the unresolved references it had... :(

> I built against bsd4.4, ncurses 4.1, 1.9.9e, 1.9.4, 1.8.7, and slang. 
> (Again, I'd like the details so I can accommodate whatever you're
> running into) 

Ok, what more details do you need?

> > 3. I finally built a color-styles version after being dissatisfied with
> > the above... and since I wanted to try it...  What can I say, but "Nifty!"
> > This is definitely cool!
> it is kind of cute (but it needs more work).

It's more than cute.  It will be really nice when it's done. :)

> > 4. There should be a way to disable color and use the mono styles if the
> > termcap says it's a color terminal, but it's really not.  I think the
> it's doable (tin-unoff does this)

This should be considered then.  That way if someone has to do a custom
terminfo in their account and set it to do color but they log in from a
non-color terminal...  I use various terminals to log in: MSKermit (VT320
w/color), TeraTerm (VT320 w/color), CRT (VT220 w/color), ProComm/Win
(VT320 mono), VT220, and VT420 (yes, REAL DEC's).  Since I have no control
over the terminfo installation, it would be nice to default it to color
all the time with a custom one and override it in those few cases where
I'm not on a color terminal.

> (afaik, the vt100 descriptions don't have color, simply because vt100's don't
> do color)

I can't remember what the one on Linux did.  Real VT100's don't have color
(never seen a real 100 or 102), but MANY emulators have color even when in
vt100 mode, and ANSI emulation doesn't always work as well as VT emulation
under unix.

> > 5. Also, I experienced a duplicatable crash at www.tv1.com on both
> I'll take a look the next time I've a debug-version built (I was going to
> work on the remaining dozen targets in the makefile).

If you need further info, contact me via e-mail, and I can point you to
exactly what I did.

> > 7. Also, the recent discussion of popups with fotemods also applies to
> > this.  Popups do not disappear as they should after selecting an item.
> > Again, this was with both ncurses 1.9.9e and 4.1.
> I've lost track of this one - my impression was that it wasn't an ncurses-
> specific problem.

Yes, this was across all curses and completely eliminated the redraw after
a popup retracted.  Fote's code at least redrew part of the time (and all 
of the time for VMS). :)

   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+
   | Hiram W. Lester, Jr.               | E-Mail: address@hidden    |
   | Computer Science                   | Home page:                    |
   | Middle Tennessee State University  |   http://pobox.com/~hwlester/ |
   +------------------------------------+-------------------------------+

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