error, or spurious error

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jan 27, 2010, Mike Schwartz wrote:
>> |      I didn't think to copy the linux and xterm entries into the
>> filepro
>> | termcap.  I thought filePro would take care of filling in any missing
>> | termcap entries as I played with different "TERM=" settings in the
>> shell.
>> 
>> Where do you suppose that filePro would get anything with which to
>> "fill
>> in" anything except from its own termcap file?  And why would you need
>> to
>> insert missing xterm or linux entries in that file unless you actually
>> were using one or the other type as your TERM setting?
>> 
>> --
>> JP
>
>     I was under the assumption that filePro got its initial termcap
>information from the shell or by reading the /etc/termmcap.  Then I thought
>that filepro used the filePro termcap file to fill in or overwrite any
>missing entries.  
>
>     I'm not sure where I got that from.  Maybe it's something I once read,
>or maybe it's because if the filePro termcap gets erased or damaged, filePro
>seems to still operate fairly well using the standard ansi entries.

It's been an age since I looked into this, but I think the way it
works is that FilePro looks at /etc/termcap or the file specified
in the $TERMCAP environment variable first to get a set of
values.  Once that's done it looks in the pf/termcap file which
mostly has values for FP specific function keys and key labels.

It does this in two steps since there's a long-standing 1024
character limit on any termcap entry, including leading
whitespace on continuation lines.

We always use TERMCAP=/usr/local/etc/termcap; export TERMCAP to
specify our own version of the termcap file, not /etc/termcap, as
system updates may well change things in /etc/termcap.  I think
that FilePro also uses some termcap entries that were common on
SCO Xenix and Unix systems that were originally done to support
Microsoft Multiplan, and are not in other vendor's /etc/termcap.

Bill
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