Reason for reordering /usr/share/misc/termcap.src for /usr/share/misc/termcap ?

[Erik Trulsson]

Quoting Garrett Cooper <yaneurabeya at gmail.com>:

> Hi all,
> 	I'm trying to resolve an issue where usr.bin/vi is needed to  
> preprocess share/termcap every time make buildworld is invoked on  
> FreeBSD. The termcap file reordering seems to have been done since  
> the BSD 4.4 Lite sources were imported into FreeBSD:  
> https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/projects/building-blocks/share/termcap/Makefile?view=markup#l15 , https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=1638 . I don't have history behind why this should be done (it's unfortunate because it appears to mangle the comment <-> entry mappings, and ultimately this gets put into termcap.db), and I was hoping that someone with additional history could fill in why this is being  
> done.
> Thank you!
>

It looks like it is done to put the most common (at the time it was  
written) terminal types early in the reordered termcap file.  This  
presumably so that programs reading termcap would be more likely to  
find the entry they wanted as quickly as possible.

That would have been useful when termcap was just a plain text file,  
but if you are using termcap.db to look up terminal capabilities then  
there doesn't seem to be much point to doing such reordering beforehand.