Bug#1053963: RFS: termpaint/0.3.0-3 [RC] -- low level terminal access - headers
On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 04:51:47AM -0400, Thomas Dickey wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 02:23:28AM +0200, Salvo Tomaselli wrote:
> > Could you improve the description?
> >
> > What does this do?
> >
> > For me low level access is ioctl, write or similar…
>
> no - in this case "low level" is a synonym for "hard-coded"
>
> It's just another of the programs written with the assumption that the
> terminal is xterm (or one of its imitators).
Well the long description clearly states that it only focuses on
"terminals in the tradition of VT1xx (like xterm, etc)".
It does make vastly different choices in terminal support than termcap and
ncurses. That allows is to have a more direct mapping of the terminal
functions but of course, it does not support nearly the breadth of
terminals that ncurses can support.
But i think that is ok, as many users nowadays use terminals in the
supported set.
Another choice where it differs is the it is build with the reality in mind
that $TERM is much more likely to be blatently wrong that than it having to
work with a terminal that is not "xterm like". Thus is uses terminal
response fingerprinting and terminal self identification to decide what
terminal implementation it is likely talking to and then uses its internal
(hard coded) terminal information to select features and workarounds.
Yes. That is throwing the towel on expecting properly administrated
systems, but a varity of factors ends making properly administrated
systems to be on the decline.
>
> Unlike the last one on this topic, it uses the terminology of ncurses
> without using the word "ncurses".
I'm not sure what you mean with the terminology of ncurses, mostly because
ncurses certainly defined a lot of the terminology of the field and thus
it's hard to say where something is ncurses (or curses) specific or just
the broader terminology with terminals.
And i think the debian package is not really the place for a detailed
discussion of the tradeoffs between say ncurses and termpaint. Or termpaint
and s-lang or ... They would need a lot of nouance, and i'm pretty sure i
would get it wrong. So i think it is better to be silent on that than to
offer something incomplete.
As you pointed out, it is not even a alternative to ncurses, because it has
a vastly smaller set of supported terminals.
- Martin
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