Pine 4.58 - termcap issues

[Shane Travis]

Recently downloaded the depot for Pine 4.58 from the HP-UX Porting and Archive Centre as part of a general push to upgrade an HP-UX 11.00 machine that has basically been ignored for the last three years.

Had to uninstall previous version of pine (4.32, if memory and notes serve well) from /opt, and this one installed into /usr/local. On trying to start it, I have received the following error:

"Can't open terminal capabilities database."

/etc/termcap is a soft-link to /usr/share/lib/termcap with permissions lr--r--r-T. I tried

I'm sure this is something simple I'm missing... but it could also be something specific to the way these guys compiled 4.58; the Centre's copy is *fairly* new (last 45 days or so) and might not be widely pulled down yet.

Anyone come across this before? Is there a fix? Is there another depot I can try? (ISTR that there is another place to look, but lost all my links recently.) Or will I have to bite the bullet and try a compile from sources?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Well, the obvious thing to do is ls -l /usr/share/lib/termcap and see if the actual file is there and if the permissions are 444. You can copy this file from another machine or simply install it as /etc/termcap. Termcap is hopelessly obsolete and all programs which used termcap should have been converted to use the terminfo database at least a decade ago.

[Shane Travis]

You are correct; that IS the obvious thing to do, and I did it already. (Sorry, had not mentioned that fact.) Also tried copying termcap from its existing location directly to /etc in case there was a link issue of some sort... and that didn't work either.

The point here is that Pine 4.30 was working fine... and STILL works fine. (I have the backup from before the upgrade.) For some reason, 4.58 -- at least, the version from the depot on the Archive Centre -- does not. Therefore it can't be a pine issue, but has to be some sort of config issue that's different between my machine and that of the person who compiled pine for the Centre. I don't know what it is, though, as I have never had any issues with the 'terminal capabilities database' before.

(And for all I know, pine DOES use terminfo; I'm the one who said termcap, not anything directly from pine itself. I'm used to working with 10-year-old HP systems running 8.0 and 9.05, so termcap is what *I* am used to, and it's where I looked. This is the first 'modern' system I've admin'ed -- and it's a learning experience for me to find out that they !$@#&! MOVED everything on me. :-)

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

The Gnu ports typically put files in /usr/local or /usr/share.

I would try this
export TERMCAP=/etc/termcap
and then invoke your program. That should override the default TERMCAP location.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

On the off chance that Pine is using terminfo, I would also set and export TERMINFO=/usr/lib/terminfo.

Although it is not listed as a requirement, I have a funny feeling that if you download and swinstall ncurses from the same source as Pine, everything will magically start working because extra termcap and terminfo files will be installed in the expected Gnu places.

[Shane Travis]

ncurses already updated from same location.

(I wasn't kidding when I said I'd been updating everything on this machine: so far, I've hit bison, bzip2, cvs, cvsgraph, emacs, flex, freetype, gd, gettext, glib, grep, gtar, gtk+, gtk+2, gzip, less, libiconv, libpng, libungif, libwmf, mpeg2, ncftp, ncurses, nedit, openssh, openssl, pcre, tcltk, tcp_wrappers, texinfo, tiff, tkdiff, unzip, vim, wdiff, wget, xpm and zlib. :-)


GOOD NEWS: Problem is solved.

'setenv TERMCAP /etc/termcap' got me one step further down the path; pine then gave me an error about not knowing what an hpterm was, so I added that into the termcap file and everything worked fine.

Looking at your second response, I remembered that there is a /usr/local/etc directory. On a hunch, I unset TERMCAP and added:

/usr/local/etc/termcap -> /usr/share/lib/termcap

This did the trick too. It looks like there's an 'updated' version of termcap on the Archive centre too; I never thought to look for that (note: it's not in the above list... probably about the only thing that isn't, it seems like) so I'll go get that and update it too. It'll probably be installed in the right place as default; had I done this first, likely it would have all worked out... although that probably would have broken the OLD version of pine. (sigh)

So... not a 'magic' answer, but enough to get me thinking in a different direction and eventually solve it. Thanks, Clay.