terminfo vs. termcap

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <6966 at june.cs.washington.edu> mckenzie at uw-june.UUCP (Neil McKenzie) writes:
>This is really dumb.  It is really mysterious why there is even an
>/etc/termcap file and even a man page to go with it because the
>termcap file is just ignored.

Many applications, for example those developed in Berkeley environments,
use /etc/termcap.  I don't know whether AUX includes "termlib" to provide
the access functions but it might (SVR2 did).

>What is even more unfriendly is that the source descriptions are
>compiled into an unreadable format.  This makes it very hard to
>study examples, since the source formats seem to be unavailable ...

There are a variety of cap-to-info tools, terminfo compilers ("tic"
is the usual name), decompilers, etc.  I don't know what AUX provides.

The reason for the binary format is to speed up loading of the
terminal description.