Re: a question about termcap support

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, Dec 15, 2023 at 05:53:17AM -0600, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> I'm preparing a heavy revision (attached) of ncurses's termcap man page,
> and I ran into some difficult material.  It starts with "Normally the
> ncurses library is compiled with terminfo support."
> 
> That implies that under some circumstances, ncurses can be compiled
> WITHOUT terminfo support, but I don't think that is possible.

It can be built without a terminfo database (and using just termcap,
optionally saved to disk as a private terminfo database).

    --disable-database
        Use only built-in data.  The ncurses libraries normally read terminfo
        and termcap data from disk.  You can configure ncurses to have a
        built-in database, aka "fallback" entries.  Embedded applications may
        have no need for an external database.  Some, but not all of the
        programs are useful in this configuration, e.g., tset and tput versus
        infocmp and tic.

    --enable-getcap
        Use the 4.4BSD getcap code if available, or a bundled version of it to
        fetch termcap entries.  Entries read in this way cannot use (make
        cross-references to) the terminfo tree, but it is faster than reading
        /etc/termcap.
 
    --enable-getcap-cache
        Cache translated termcaps under the directory $HOME/.terminfo

    --without-progs
        Tell the configure script to suppress the build of ncurses' application
        programs (e.g., tic).  The test applications will still be built if you
        type "make", though not if you simply do "make install".

Doing that, most users would tend to agree that it lacks terminfo support :-)

(the wording's Eric Raymond though).

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

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