Aaron Sloman See text for reply address wrote:
> Ideally linux poplog should be upgraded not to require termcap.
>
> Maybe someone else could suggest how to do this as I lack the relevant
> know-how and time.
I don't know enough to be confident about the best solution, but here
are a couple of points to consider:
1. Use of termcap doesn't seem to be crucial to anything.
The following appears at the beginning of SRC termcap.p:
/* NCR's termcap/curses library screws up X when used in
anything other than the C locale (it includes its own
definitions of the mbstring functions).
Who needs it anyway?
*/
#_TERMIN_IF DEF NCR
So if there are users of NCR poplog, they get by without termcap. As
far as I can see, termcap is invoked only as a desperation measure if
other ways of finding ved initialisation files for the current terminal
type fail. So it's very likely that almost no one actually uses the
termcap code on any regular basis, since ved does have standard
initialisation files for xterms.
That said, it's an attractive idea to have the operating system provide
the information necessary for setting up terminals, rather than
requiring poplog to keep up to date on terminal types. Whether it is
really practical - termcap and/or terminfo don't cover keyboard layouts,
for instance - and whether it leaves poplog too much at the mercy of
distribution packagers, are another matter.
2. The problem arose in this particular case because linux poplog is
dynamically linked to libtermcap. This means that the operating system
won't start up poplog if it can't find libtermcap, regardless of whether
libtermcap is actually going to be used. Even with calls to libtermcap
compiled in, it doesn't need to be dynamically linked. Sun poplog
isn't. I think there are a couple of places in the process of linking a
new linux poplog where static linking of libtermcap could be specified.
In particular, there is code in SRC termcap.p that specifies static
linking for libcurses (which provides the libtermcap function calls on
systems which have terminfo and no termcap).
In a different message, Aaron wrote:
> .... someone who simply wishes to
> learn the basics of pop-11.
> I agree that it would be useful to have a downloadable package which
> contains only what is needed for that.
> It could be that Steve Isard's mini-linux-pop is such a package,
> though I have not looked closely.
> http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/mini-linux-pop/
Maybe. It's a full pop11, although without the X interface, and I don't
think any of the lib, help or ref files that I've left out could really
be described as basic. However, the teach directory has been reduced to:
eliza grammar popsummary river riverchat
eliza2 isasent respond river2 whysyntax
Beware, though, that it is not just mini, it is libc5. The two go
together insofar as mini-linux distributions, mostly intended to be run
on old machines, are often based on libc5, because it is smaller. I
wanted to make poplog available for such distributions. In the past
couple of years, some large distributions have abandoned compatibility
with libc5, so my package won't run on RedHat 7.1, for instance.
Steve
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