The FreeBSD diaries ... installing filePro for FreeBSD

[Brian K. White]

Ryan Powers wrote:
> On Thu, May 20, 2004 at 08:39:20PM -0400, Brian K. White said:
>
>> If the console is going to set TERM to cons25, why in the world
>> wouldn't you want an entry in fp termcap to be named cons25? PFTERM
>> is a great feature that allows various tricks to be pulled off in
>> odd situations, but in 99% of instances you should never need it.
>
> There is already a cons25 termcap entry in /etc/termcap which is
> insufficient for use with the native FreeBSD version of filePro. So
> in order to avoid confusion between that and the custom one
> designed specifically for filePro it seemed prudent to give it a
> different name.
>
> By confusion I mean the difference between playing 21 questions and
> asking "is PFTERM set to bsd"?

I don't get it.

There are already, and rightly so, system termcap & terminfo for _every_
terminal type being used.
The only sane thing to do is create a cons25 definition in the fp termcap
that includes any fields the system definition lacks or any that are
necessary for filepro, exactly as you are already doing for linux and sco
ansi and all the rest. freebsd is no different.

Doing anything else is madness.

If you want to provide yourself with a fallback to facilitate support, then
make "bsd" just one of the alternate names in the same "cons25" definition,
and by default do not set PFTERM but instead allow the natural TERM to do
what it's supposed to. Then while on the phone with someone you can
temporarily override the normal automatic mechanism and enforce the use of a
particular termcap entry by having the user set PFTERM only interactively
and only lasting for the duration of that login session.
So the fp termcap entry should start like:
cons25|bsd|FreeBSD Console:\


Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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