TERMCAP/TERMINFO problems

When Python is the interpreter, what is a good
design for the interface to the basic NEURON
concepts.

Moderator: hines

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wwlytton
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Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 10:37 pm
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TERMCAP/TERMINFO problems

Post by wwlytton »

A runtime error can arise due to conflicts between different terminal definitions provided by different versions of ncurses compiled in for NEURON vs Python. This will manifest as a series of "conflict" measures: eg
Name collision between dumb dumb ....
Name collision between att615-w att615-w att615-w
Name collision between att615-103k att615-103k att615-103k
...

The messages are not themselves fatal. But since there are more than 1e5 of them (that's the point where I got bored), it makes the program unusable.

Mike Hines pointed me in the right direction and noted several solutions on the web, eg
http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/for ... Id=1105561

They suggest setting TERMINFO explicitly. This did not work for me. They also a need to have ncurses libraries though in my case the problem seemed to be too many ncurses libraries rather than too few.

The solution I hit upon was to effectively unset TERMCAP. Unsetting actually ddidn't work, but setting to a nonexistent file does, eg
setenv TERMCAP /etc/asdf # tcsh
export TERMCAP=/etc/asdf # for bash

Note that asdf is a file that doesn't exist and once not found you will be left with a "dumb" terminal which lacks controls.

Another way to do this was to simply remove /etc/termcap but then all terminals are dumb.
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