+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-HISTORY">HISTORY</a></H2><PRE>
+ System V Release 2 provided a <STRONG>tic</STRONG> utility. It accepted a single
+ option: <STRONG>-v</STRONG> (optionally followed by a number). According to Ross
+ Ridge's comment in <EM>mytinfo</EM>, this version of <STRONG>tic</STRONG> was unable to represent
+ cancelled capabilities.
+
+ System V Release 3 provided a different <STRONG>tic</STRONG> utility, written by Pavel
+ Curtis, (originally named "compile" in <EM>pcurses</EM>). This added an option
+ <STRONG>-c</STRONG> to check the file for errors, with the caveat that errors in "use="
+ links would not be reported. System V Release 3 documented a few warn-
+ ing messages which did not appear in <EM>pcurses</EM>. While the program itself
+ was changed little as development continued with System V Release 4,
+ the table of capabilities grew from 180 (<EM>pcurses</EM>) to 464 (Solaris).
+
+ In early development of ncurses (1993), Zeyd Ben-Halim used the table
+ from <EM>mytinfo</EM> to extend the <EM>pcurses</EM> table to 469 capabilities (456
+ matched SVr4, 8 were only in SVr4, 13 were not in SVr4). Of those 13,
+ 11 were ultimately discarded (perhaps to match the draft of X/Open
+ Curses). The exceptions were <STRONG>memory_lock_above</STRONG> and <STRONG>memory_unlock</STRONG> (see
+ <STRONG><A HREF="user_caps.5.html">user_caps(5)</A></STRONG>).
+
+ Eric Raymond incorporated parts of <EM>mytinfo</EM> into ncurses to implement
+ the termcap-to-terminfo source conversion, and extended that to begin
+ development of the corresponding terminfo-to-termcap source conversion,
+ Thomas Dickey completed that development over the course of several
+ years.
+
+ In 1999, Thomas Dickey added the <STRONG>-x</STRONG> option to support user-defined
+ capabilities.
+
+ In 2010, Roy Marples provided a <STRONG>tic</STRONG> program and terminfo library for
+ NetBSD. That implementation adapts several features from ncurses,
+ including <STRONG>tic</STRONG>'s <STRONG>-x</STRONG> option.
+
+ The <STRONG>-c</STRONG> option tells <STRONG>tic</STRONG> to check for problems in the terminfo source
+ file. Continued development provides additional checks:
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> <EM>pcurses</EM> had 8 warnings
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> ncurses in 1996 had 16 warnings
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> Solaris (SVr4) curses has 28 warnings
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> NetBSD tic in 2019 has 19 warnings.
+
+ <STRONG>o</STRONG> ncurses in 2019 has 96 warnings
+
+ The checking done in ncurses' <STRONG>tic</STRONG> helps with the conversion to termcap,
+ as well as pointing out errors and inconsistencies. It is also used to
+ ensure consistency with the user-defined capabilities. There are 527
+ distinct capabilities in ncurses' terminal database; 128 of those are
+ user-defined.
+
+
+</PRE><H2><a name="h2-PORTABILITY">PORTABILITY</a></H2><PRE>
+ X/Open Curses, Issue 7 (2009) provides a brief description of <STRONG>tic</STRONG>. It
+ lists one option: <STRONG>-c</STRONG>. The omission of <STRONG>-v</STRONG> is unexpected. The change
+ history states that the description is derived from True64 UNIX.
+ According to its manual pages, that system also supported the <STRONG>-v</STRONG>
+ option.
+
+ Shortly after Issue 7 was released, Tru64 was discontinued. As of
+ 2019, the surviving implementations of <STRONG>tic</STRONG> are SVr4 (AIX, HP-UX and
+ Solaris), ncurses and NetBSD curses. The SVr4 <STRONG>tic</STRONG> programs all support
+ the <STRONG>-v</STRONG> option. The NetBSD <STRONG>tic</STRONG> program follows X/Open's documentation,
+ omitting the <STRONG>-v</STRONG> option.
+
+ The X/Open rationale states that some implementations of <STRONG>tic</STRONG> read ter-
+ minal descriptions from the standard input if the <EM>file</EM> parameter is
+ omitted. None of these implementations do that. Further, it comments
+ that some may choose to read from "./terminfo.src" but that is obsoles-
+ cent behavior from SVr2, and is not (for example) a documented feature
+ of SVr3.
+
+
+</PRE><H3><a name="h3-COMPATIBILITY">COMPATIBILITY</a></H3><PRE>
projects / ncurses.git / blobdiff