Matthew Seaman wrote:
I think you're not going to have much luck here. Custom termcap entries
are not something that most FreeBSD users deal with and consequently there
does not seem to be any useful mechanism established for managing them.
Hrm... maybe if I raise a big enough stink termcap can be installed in
/etc, managed by mergemaster, and everyone will go away happy... me
because I have what I want and everyone else because I finalyl shut up. ;-)
The curses(3X) man page seems to be they key reference. Particularly
the section on environment variables: TERM, TERMCAP, TERMPATH. It does
also mention the possibility of using ${HOME}/.termcap to hold supplementary
termcap entries. However, these man pages are rather confusing: many of them
talk about terminfo(5) in terms of 'it is going to replace termcap(5) any
day now'. But terminfo(5) is a SysV-ism and supported only as a compatibility
thing under FreeBSD.
I'm fairly certain that anything the curses man pages have to say on the
topic is wrong (and I dare you to read the terminfo manpage - it's been
dead on my system for some time... but that's Ok, since it's not
applicable). I believe that *BSD is the only platform using termcap
with ncurses left on the planet. I use termcap(5) as my primary source,
but have a firm belief that the last two thirds of the "CAVEATS AND
BUGS" section is completely wrong.
Most people will be perfectly happy with the default termcap database -- so
long as it provides xterm / vt100 and cons25 almost all situations are covered.
Yeah.
For your purposes if using environment variables to achieve your ends turns out
not to be workable, then I'd suggest keeping a backup copy of your customised
termcap somewhere where system updates won't overwrite it -- keeping it
in CVS or similar would be a good move -- and writing yourself a little
script to merge in your changes to /usr/share/misc/termcap and then re-run
'cap_mkdb /usr/share/misc/termcap' after a system update. I've a feeling that
/etc/termcap is there mostly for historical compatibility now-adays.
*nod* I've done a basic hack now and plastered stickynotes on all my
systems with dumb terminals. We'll see how well that system works out. :-)
I haven't yet found a way to use env variables (and haven't futzed
around with ~/.termcap yet) with entries in /etc/ttys I suspect it won't
work but I won't know until I beat myself to death with them.
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