Redraw problem with USG 3.x curses

[Thad P Floryan]

km at mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg) in <6476 at emory.mathcs.emory.edu> writes:

	We recently had a need to rebuild the binary for a curses based program
	(sc as it happens), and found that the recompiled version performed a
	lot worse than the old one. Specifically scrolling degenerated to full
	screen updates that were slow even at 9600 baud. This is with the
	generic vt100 terminfo entry.

	A little investigation showed that the behavior was completely
	determined by which libcurses.a we linked against. We got the slow
	scroll with the 2.1, 3.1, and 3.2 versions of the library, but fast
	scroll with 3.0. The "versions" I'm describing are the System V release
	the library came with, not the internal library version (so 3.2 means
	System V R 3.2).

	Anyone know anything about this? The tests were done on a system (3B2)
	where we had all the releases mentioned, but we need to move the
	program to a system that only has 3.2.

'Sfunny, I had exactly the same symptoms (slow full-screen update, etc.) using
Apple's latest A/UX 2.0.  Investigation showed the problem (on A/UX) to be due
to ancient termcap and terminfo databases supplied by Apple.  I did NOT have
the problem on my 3B1, SVR3.2, CTIX, or other systems.

On the off-chance my solution may help you, I've included (below) the steps
required to fix the problem under A/UX (as I posted to comp.unix.aux); this
was originally in response to someone having problems "coming in" on the Mac
serial ports under A/UX:

``
If you want to come in on the serial ports with terminals such as VT100, DT80,
VT200, or Falco, there are a LOT of other things you have to fix re: terminfo
and termcap databases since the stock distribution (both A/UX 1.* and 2.0) is
crap in these regards.  Missing, for example, are infocmp (complementing tic),
and the acsc (among other) strings in terminfo (you'll see what I mean if you
attempt to use EMACS remotely and wonder why you cannot scroll windows :-)

I've been meaning to post a list of things to fix the terminfo, termcap, and
improve curses support, but haven't had the time yet.  But, in essence, you
want to replace /etc/termcap with one from, say, ucbvax.berkeley.edu or from
ucbarpa.berkeley.edu, and also decompile all the terminfo database using the
infocmp on a real SV system (R3.*, R4 or even a 3B1), copy those *.ti files to
A/UX, and recompile using tic under A/UX.  These changes make a tremendous
capability and performance difference, besides supporting many terminals not
included in the A/UX 2.0 distribution.

Look at the man pages on a SVR3 system to see how to use infocmp; for some
reason, someone went through a lot of trouble to carefully REMOVE all the
references to infocmp in the man pages for terminfo under A/UX and to also
NOT include the infocmp program in the distribution; fortunately, tic does
accompany A/UX 2.0 and has a man page.  And, luckily, tic doesn't coredump
when it encounters terminfo capabilties not supported under A/UX 2.0 (it
simply ignores them).

''

Thad Floryan [ thad at cup.portal.com (OR) ..!sun!portal!cup.portal.com!thad ]