[illumos-Developer] 415 libreadline.so.5: symbol tgetent ... not found

[Gordon Ross]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> Generally, it looks good.  Any reason we have to ship termcap.h though?
> Applications shouldn't be including this should they?  (Its not present
> on our existing system....)

We don't have to ship it, but I think it's better to do so.  Here's why:

Before this (proposed) work, we did not really have a libtermcap.
An application that needed the BSD-ish tget* etc functions had to
import all of libcurses, and the headers defining what you actually
import are curses.h and term.h.

With the proposed filter library as libtermcap, it's actually possible
to import only the six BSD-ish tget* etc functions.  (And do that in a
way that does not drag in libcurses if you have another curses lib
providing those symbols).  So I think it's helpful to actually provide a
header defining that interface, and termcap.h is the traditional name
of the header to define that.

The proposed termcap.h is just like the traditional BSD one, so I
don't expect it to cause surprises in applications.  As an example,
the readline code autoconfgure found and used it just fine.

Gordon