Recently was some threads here covered bash and bash2 compatibility. I have one question and one suggestion here (last is mostly to bash maintainers). The question is -- why RedHat uses termcap/libtermcap interface, while [n]curses is a more general interface and "backward" compatible with termcap? For bash, it is not a simple question, since it should work in rescue mode and/or while /usr is not mounted, but libncurses is far bigger than libtermcap and requires more files in /usr/share/terminfo than just one (/etc/termcap). But for other programs ncurses is better (i think). Recently I hacked bash2 package and installed it as bash, and with shared readline. It is not surprise to me now that with this system won't boot, since all init scripts are executed by /bin/sh, that is symlink to /bin/bash, that is linked to libreadline.so and libncurses.so, and that last ones resides in /usr/lib, but /usr should be mounted from init script... ;-) And here I understand why libtermcap is in /lib while libncurses is in /usr/lib... So -- here is my second question/suggestion: is it ok for bash to dynamically load readline and friends only if it is in interactive mode, and fall back to simple read/fgets interface if it is unable to load them, like if it was configured with --disable-readline option? If ok, it can be used without termcap/ncurses/readline at all in rescue disk, and will startup (very little) faster since for non-interactive executions (e.g. for scripts). There should be minimal code tweaking for this in bash... Comments? Regards, Michael. -- To unsubscribe: mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
