Re: [RFC] Split Terminfo database

[Milan P . Stanić]

On Sun, 2020-02-09 at 09:13, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 09, 2020 at 01:07:11PM +0530, Marc Boocha wrote:
> > Dear Thomas Dickery,
> > 
> > I notice there is alot of terminfo enties in the current terminainfo.src
> > that are for old terminal that are not common in use today. I suggest that
> > these of teminfo packages could be split into a second file which users
> > could choose not install. This also make the file more readable and more
> > hackable.
> 
> That's an FAQ:
> 
> https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses.faq.html#big_terminfo
> 
> as well as an issue for packagers.  I don't recall any packager
> getting my advice on things like this:
 
Alpine Linux have it split:
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=ncurses-terminfo-base&branch=edge

but because of package dependencies we usually got all terminfo
installed, i.e. ncurses-terminfo-base and ncurses-terminfo

Once I tried to fix this but gave up after saw how much work need to
coordinate (and persuade) this with different package maintainers.

> https://packages.debian.org/sid/ncurses-base
> https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/ncurses-base
> 
> I could develop a nicer script than the one in the FAQ (e.g., starting
> with a set of names, construct a source which has those names and the
> building-blocks cited with "use=" clauses), but none of the packagers
> would use it.