Re: documentation nit / TERMINFO in ncurses man pages

On Fri, Apr 07, 2023 at 09:51:30AM -0500, Dan Mack wrote:
> 
> I recently logged into one of my FreeBSD systems from an alacritty terminal.
> FreeBSD didn't have a termcap entry for alacritty so I generated one with
> tic and all was well.   However, I noticed the following issues with the
> TERM* related tools (I guess this is all from contrib/ncurses in /usr/src).
> 
> Specifically, the issue is for example - the tic(1M) man page says in the
> FILES section:
> 
>  /usr/share/misc/terminfo/?/*
>     Compiled terminal description database.

The "misc" appears to come from lib/ncurses/config.mk,
and (since the library holds the pathname) would be
used in usr.bin/ncurses --

However, I don't see any of those programs installed in /usr/bin on
an up-to-date FreeBSD machine.  If you have tic, I'd expect it to be
in the add-on package (in /usr/local/bin).

> However, when you run tic(1M), the compiled terminal files are actually
> placed in /usr/share/terminfo/?/* .   I thought I could create a simple one
> line fix by re-defining the definition for *d in the manpage, however, it
> looks like there there might be a need to create two separate directory
> variables instead.

The manpage shows only the default location for writing files.
tic only has one of those (corresponding to $TERMINFO).

Further in the manpage, it summarizes the places tic looks to read files
(corresponding to $TERMINFO_DIRS).

> On FreeBSD-Current HEAD (2d3614fb132b1cb8efd1e0accdd0c98ce6893efa) I am
> seeing two directories in use:
> 
>   /usr/share/terminfo/?    - compiled entries created by tic(1M)
> and
>   /usr/share/misc          - contains the files termcap and termcap.db
> 
> Looks like this directory reference is set to *d here in the tic manpage:
> 
> 18259542b2f8f contrib/ncurses/man/tic.1m 2000-10-11 07:31:01 +0000  37) .ds
> d @TERMINFO@
> 
> Since this is also set in alot of other places, we probably need someone to
> make some sort of decision :-)
> 
> Dan
> 

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey <dickey@invisible-island.net>
https://invisible-island.net