[ksh93-integration-discuss] Small question about enabling the"multiline" mode...

[Roland Mainz]

David Korn wrote:
> > On 8/30/06, James Carlson <james.d.carlson at sun.com> wrote:
> > > Roland Mainz writes:
[snip]
> > > The terminal emulators in Solaris are roughly VT102 (including
> > > scrolling commands that the VT100 didn't have).  But only roughly;
> > > there are many differences among the various implementations and
> > > between them and a real DEC VTxxx series terminal.  (Function key
> > > assignment and usage is one quite large area of difference.)
> > >
> > > In any event, it'd sort of be nice to use the system libraries to get
> > > the _right_ terminal sequences, just for those who are stuck using
> > > oddball devices.
> >
> > David, is a reason why ksh93 can't use the system libraries?
> 
> The latest release uses infocmp internally to get the cursor up escape
> sequence so it should work for any terminal in infocmp.

What will happen if "infocmp" is not available at runtime, for example
when "infocmp" lines in "/usr/bin/infocmp" but "/usr" isn't mounted yet
and/or ksh93 lives in /sbin and the user only booted into a runlevel
where /usr is not available ?
The issue is quite tricky becase /usr/share/lib/terminfo/ lives in /usr
which means there is no easy solution... ;-(

> Since ksh might be installed as /bin/sh, I try to keep the startup
> time down and the data area small since system() uses /bin/sh for
> often very simple commands.  The time to fork() is affected by
> the data size so adding libraries with large data areas can
> slow down the time to fork().  This is why I don't link to libraries
> unless necessary.

I agree with that. And libcurses is a giant monstrisity and as long as
Solaris compiles such libraries without "-xstrconst" (which means string
literals are treated as r/w data without "-xstrconst", causing bloat in
the copy&write lists created for each process child) it should be
treated as "no go"-area...

----

Bye,
Roland

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