Talk:Terminfo

message: pcurses had compile/dump programs, which in ncurses evolved to tic/infocmp
Other than ncurses, infocmp was developed at AT&T
*O'Reilly book on terminfo cites Tony Hansen
*comment in source-code for infocmp.c, Tony Hansen, February 23, 1984
untic appears to have been developed independently, and later incorporated by HP and others:
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Ross's mytinfo used tconv, as noted here (originally 1994):
*The ADOM Fluff FAQ
Tedickey (talk) 18:50, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  infocmp vs untic 

message: *A termcap/terminfo Description for xterm
Tedickey (talk) 23:13, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: terminfo tutorials

message: And even more importantly, attributes that may have a valid negative value!. Of which arguably the most common might be "xmc" ("magic cookie"), which on some older terminals can have a valid value of -1.
Old_Wombat (talk) 05:31, 8 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: That's an internal value.  A terminal description can only specify positive numbers. TEDickey (talk) 11:27, 8 January 2012 (UTC)

text: A likely place to look would be in older (HPUX 9 or 10) manpages, since HPUX had/has support for that flavor of xmc.  The newer stuff is based on X/Open, which states the limits are 0 to 32767. TEDickey (talk) 11:39, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

text: The CPU is irrelevant; the terminal (or emulator) might be of interest TEDickey (talk) 11:59, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "...  A terminfo entry may use negative numbers to represent cancelled or absent values." 

message: An important improvement that is not mentioned is that a termcap definition was conceptually a single line. So when you wrote it out over multiple lines, you had to have backslashes in all but the last line, and the total number of characters (including all whitespaces) you were limited to whatever "linelength" was for your Unix de jour. So if, for example, your terminal had 16 function and other keys, and your linelength was say 1024 (a common value in pre-terminfo days), you may have had difficulty putting all of those attributes in. With terminfo, your source file size could be much greater and this problem did not occur.
Another important difference between termcap and terminfo was that in the former you could arbitrarily create attribute names and give them values; with terminfo, you could only include what tic (or whatever corresponding utility you had) supported.
Old_Wombat (talk) 09:19, 11 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Terminfo tried to address performance problems that were specific to the UNIX v7 filesystem that was still used by AT&T in the early 1980s. Compared to the state of the art with termcap on BSD UNIX in 1982, this was a slow down. Note that around 1980 people did already learn to store parsed termcap entries in the environment which reduced the number of file accesses to one per login. Also reading one large file was already fast in the BSD-4.2 filesystem (UFS/FFS) and reading a small file from a directory tree with many entries at that time was slower than opening/reading one single file. Compiled terminfo entries are still limited to 4095 bytes and aprox. 1000 bytes from that are used by the structure of the file. Modern termcap implementations on the other side support unlimited entry lenghts and an unlimited number of tc= entries. As a result, I cannot see real improvements with terminfo - it seems that the advantages (such as longer entries by default) are in balance to the disadvantages (such as binary compatibility).  --Schily (talk) 18:08, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

text: Responding to the first, that's brought out and discussed in detail in TCTEST - A Termcap Test Utility, noting that the 1023-byte limit is computed differently for BSD4.3 and later (since excess whitespace is discarded on loading into the terminal database).  Compiled terminfo entries are limited to 4096 bytes.  In both cases, that is a conventional limit which could be altered (at the cost of portability).   For the second, that's true enough, but ncurses has (since 1999) supported user-defined capabilities. Other implementations do not do this; however there is nothing in the terminfo syntax which prevents this (ncurses being an example). At the moment, looking over the topic I see that I did not mention this fact in this topic. TEDickey (talk) 11:37, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

text: The ncurses FAQ addresses some of these points in Why use terminfo instead of extensible termcap? TEDickey (talk) 11:43, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

text: Suppose we discuss it here (my explanations are likely to be too detailed for the topic, so a draft from you with my pointing out issues might be a way to proceed) TEDickey (talk) 11:21, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

text: There are no WP:RS mentioned in any of Schily's edits. TEDickey (talk) 23:15, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Improvements over termcap". 

message: Mary Ann Horton was very important to the development of this software, but most of this work was published under her deadname.  MOS:DEADNAME suggests crediting the author like "Mary Horton (credited as Mark Horton)".  But Horton is mentioned several times throughout the article, each time using the Deadname.  If every instance of "Mark Horton" is changed to "Mary Horton (credited as Mark Horton)", it seems like that would draw excessive attention to Horton's gender identity, which seems contrary to the spirit of MOS:DEADNAME.  Is there a better way to do this?  Would it be acceptable to use "(credited as Mark Horton)" only the first time it's mentioned in this article, perhaps?  I'm not aware of any guidance more specific than MOS:DEADNAME.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gnebulon (talk • contribs) 13:43, 16 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The problem with your intended edit is that there are no technical references using the so-called "live name".  All of the relevant technical work was done at least 10 years earlier. TEDickey (talk) 13:48, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

text: "Horton" after the first appearance. 81.187.27.126 (talk) 18:35, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

text: My reading of of the MOS is that, generally, mentioning the former name is only appropriate once, in the lede.  "Name and gender matters should be explained at first appearance in that article, without overemphasis".  So I have done that.  It seemed appropriate to mention the deadname in the citation, since people looking that up will need the name which was used at the time.  I had to bodge that rather.  If someone knows a better way to do this please do step up :-).  Ijackson (talk) 19:34, 30 October 2021 (UTC)

text: The MOS doesn't tell editors to revise historical information and make up facts on talk-pagers.  It's only relevant going forward. TEDickey (talk) 19:38, 30 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text:  you're mistaken. Please take another read of the MOS. It says:  So in absence of a stated preference from Horton for the contrary, their current name is their primary name in this article. I don't see a reason to repeat the name outside the first mention. For the name in the reference itself, what Ijackson did seems to be the best solution per the MOS.  Nil Einne (talk) 12:35, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

text: Revising the citation as recently done makes this a Wikipedia-only fact.  If you want to have a reliable source to support that, making arrangements with the 'Usenet' organization to change their documentation seems a plausible approach.  By the way, the other editor appears to be asserting that I have recently reverted the current set of changes to this topic.  That's harrassment. TEDickey (talk) 13:09, 31 October 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: We have an article Mary Ann Horton supported by a number of reliable sources. There is no possible dispute that Mary Horton is the current name of the person. From what I can tell, no one has claimed you reverted the most recent change. What User:Ijackson has said, correctly, is that you've been preventing the article being brought into line with MOS:GENDERID by continually reverting until now. Since this is a BLP matter, you've also been preserving a BLP violation for several years. While is is unfortunate that no one pointed to the correct guideline until now, it is your responsibility as an editor to familiarise yourself with our policies and guidelines at least to the extent that you do not commit BLP violations. Since we do not WP:PUNISH editors here, provided you stop and don't repeat your violations, no action will be taken against you. But this doesn't change the fact you've preserved a BLP violation for over 3.5 years . And so it was perfectly fine for an inexperienced editor to seek help at BLPN being concerned you might not stop and also needing help if you did not stop. If you don't want editors to raise concerns about your editing, then don't violate BLP for 3.5 years. (N.B. While it's true things were less clear before the recentish RfC Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography/2021 archive#RfC: Changing MOS:DEADNAME on how to credit individuals on previously released works, it's been a long time since the correct solution was simply to not mention the current name at all for a notable person with an article we are linking to.) Nil Einne (talk) 13:53, 31 October 2021 (UTC)

text: I don't follow your argument here.  For the avoidance of doubt: Your repeated citation of WP:RS is not appropriate and does not justify your edits.  The page history here shows multiple people correcting your wrong edits, but you keep changing them back.  I have reviewed the WP dispute resolution and escalation processes and it looks like some of these processes may be needed.  For now I have made a report at Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#Terminfo. Ijackson (talk)  — Preceding undated comment added 20:20, 30 October 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  How to credit Mary Horton