On Wed, Feb 20, 2002 at 12:02:14AM +0200, Artem Okounev wrote: > On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 04:44:22PM -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote: > > On Tue, Feb 19, 2002 at 10:36:37PM +0100, Manuel Hendel wrote: > > > Where's the advantage in using slang instead of ncurses? > > > > this question is asked about once a week... > Probably in mutt-devel, but not here. Explain please.
or perhaps my sense of time is warped. The mutt configuration with ncurses or slang provides roughly equal capabilities (there are different bugs in each, btw, though people who want to use slang tend to gloss over that aspect). I use ncurses, of course, and am familiar with many of the ways ports/distributions add bugs to it. FreeBSD adds another layer of bugs (over what's in mutt) because the ports don't integrate properly. There are pros/cons on Linux regarding UTF-8 support, but my impression is that FreeBSD is not viable for that anyway, so it's a moot point. The main impact on ncurses is that occasionally I see reports of library conflicts between the native copy of ncurses and a ported version. That shouldn't be a problem post-4.0 FreeBSd, but you might be surprised - anyway the BSD loader uses some sort of weak binding that is easily confused by libraries containing similar symbols. Since there's only one version of slang (ports tend to do that), there's no conflicts. Another is the frequent misadvice to use the xterm-color termcap entry - which kills the use of default colors (unless of course one has the compensating bug of slang apps that check $COLORTERM to decide when to ignore the termcap ;-) However - as reported by someone recently, since slang is looking first at termcap, that has an adverse effect on line-drawing characters (unless propped up by yet another kludge to ignore the termcap, since the xterm-color termcap is too small to provide that capability). ncurses uses terminfo - not a problem there (though FreeBSD does wedge that termcap stuff in there, providing additional problems for the unwary). Summary - there's no real advantage, but some of the troubleshooting of setting the configuration up for a novice is alleviated by slang's workarounds. But the result is only superfically ok - some loss of functionality results. -- Thomas E. Dickey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://invisible-island.net ftp://invisible-island.net
