With ncurses 5.7, eterm-color (used by Emacs) cannot be found under Mac OS X

[Vincent Lefevre]

Hi,

After upgrading from ncurses 5.6 to ncurses 5.7, eterm-color (make-term
in Emacs sets TERM to "eterm-color") is no longer found. The problem
is that ncursesw only provides Eterm-color (with a capital E). With
ncursesw 5.6, the terminfo data were stored under the pathname
/opt/local/share/terminfo/e/Eterm-color, but since HFS+ (default
Mac OS X file system) is case-insensitive, the file was read and the
terminfo data for eterm-color came from this file (as a side effect?).
Now, with ncursesw 5.7, the file is stored under the pathname
/opt/local/share/terminfo/45/Eterm-color, i.e. the first letter has
been replaced by its ASCII code. And since 'E' and 'e' don't have
the same ASCII code, ncurses searches for the file 65/eterm-color
and infocmp gives the error: 

prunille:~> infocmp eterm-color
infocmp: couldn't open terminfo file /opt/local/share/terminfo/65/eterm-color.

I've tried by adding a file $HOME/.terminfo/65/Eterm-color and this
workaround solves the problem:

prunille:~> infocmp eterm-color
#       Reconstructed via infocmp from file: 
/Users/vinc17/.terminfo/65/eterm-color
Eterm|Eterm-color|Eterm with xterm-style color support (X Window System),
[...]

Note: there's no such problem under Debian though it has a case-sensitive
file system, because it solves the problem in another way: emacs defines
a $TERMCAP environment variable containing the eterm-color definition.

I also reported the bug in MacPorts:

  http://trac.macports.org/ticket/17401

-- 
Vincent Lefèvre <address@hidden> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)