Re: Using git in PASE

[Scott Klement <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the days of non-programmable terminals for Unix (similar to the 5250 
terminals we used to use, except that they're not screen-at-a-time) 
there were hundreds of types of terminals made by different 
manufacturers, and they were all different.   Different escape sequences 
were sent to the terminal to make it do different things, etc.

terminfo is a database of those escape sequences.  So, for example, if 
if an application wants to make a terminal "beep", it calls a system API 
(in curses, ncurses, etc, library) and that API looks in the terminfo 
database to see what escape sequence has to be sent to the terminal in 
make the terminal beep.  It then sends the appropriate sequence... 
There'd be an entry in terminfo for everyhing the plain text terminal 
could do... moving the cursor, changing colors, backspace, tab, etc, 
they'd all have entries to look up in the terminfo database.

Even those the terminals themeselves are pretty rare these days, that's 
still how Unix talks to plain-text displays. They register themselves as 
a particular terminal type, and the appropriate escape sequence is 
looked up in terminfo.

In your example, you must be running an xterm (or compatible) terminal. 
 The GIT software is calling a routine to do something on the screen, 
and that routine has to look up the terminfo entry for the xterm terminal.

However (probably because this is on IBM i and not a genuine Unix 
system) there's no terminfo entry for xterm.  I suppose you could add 
one if you know the correct settings...



Pete Helgren wrote:
> Has anybody used git in the the PASE environment?  I just tried it and 
> got the following:
>
> $ git
>
> GNU Interactive Tools 4.3.20 (rs6000-ibm-aix)
> GIT is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the
> terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
> Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.
> Copyright (C) 1993-1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> Written by Tudor Hulubei and Andrei Pitis, Bucharest, Romania
>
> git: can't find the terminal type xterm in the terminfo database.
> $
>
> Google turned up nothing useful.  I am not familiar enough with AIX or 
> Linux to know what the terminfo database would be.  There is probably a 
> missing environment variable or something along those lines but I am not 
> sure.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Pete Helgren