Re: Missing terminfo entries?

[Raymond Penners <raymondp@stack.urc.tue.nl>]

Fabrizio Polacco <fpolacco@megabaud.fi> writes:

> > Both TERMCAP and TERMINFO are unset. Setting TERMINFO to
> > /usr/lib/terminfo doesn't help either. So, IMHO, the Debian ncurses
> > package is broken.
> > 
> What kind of test did you do to say that? 

Perhaps not ncurses itself, but something is wrong somewhere.  Several
programs such as "vim" (3.0-5), "joe"/"jmacs" (2.8-4) complain about a
missing termcap entries (e.g. when I set TERM=amiga).

I did not have "termcap-compat" installed, since it mentions:

--8<-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  You do not need to install this package to run Debian-packaged programs
  since Debian Linux uses terminfo and not termcap. You need this
  package if a program fails to run with the following error message
   "...: can't load library 'libtermcap.so.2'"
  or complains about a missing /etc/termcap file.
--8<-----------------------------------------------------------------------

So, IMHO, the above text needs to be changed (since both vim and joe
are Debian-packaged programs) or these packages should require/suggest
termcap-compat.

> I re-read your first message and noticed that you refere to
>  "Amiga terminal emulation"
> ncurses and terminfo are not for terminal emulation, on the contrary
> they allow a terminal (for example an amiga running a terminal emulator)
> to log in the host and run curses applications.

That's exactly what I am doing: logging in from the Amiga to the Linux
box, running Emacs.

-- 
Raymond Penners <raymondp@stack.urc.tue.nl>