[Bug 1098373] Re: man terminfo (5) does not mention /etc/terminfo or /lib/terminfo

[Thomas Dickey]

That's a Debian-specific customization, as discussed in
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647323

** Bug watch added: Debian Bug tracker #647323
   http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647323

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Title:
  man terminfo (5) does not mention /etc/terminfo or /lib/terminfo

Status in “ncurses” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  12.04.1 LTS man terminfo (5) says:

  Fetching Compiled Descriptions
         If  the  environment variable TERMINFO is set, it is interpreted as the
         pathname of a directory containing the  compiled  description  you  are
         working on.  Only that directory is searched.

         If TERMINFO is not set, the ncurses version of the terminfo reader code
         will instead look in  the  directory  $HOME/.terminfo  for  a  compiled
         description.   If it fails to find one there, and the environment vari-
         able TERMINFO_DIRS is set, it will interpret the contents of that vari-
         able as a list of colon- separated directories to be searched (an empty
         entry is interpreted as a command to search  /usr/share/terminfo).   If
         no  description  is  found in any of the TERMINFO_DIRS directories, the
         fetch fails.

         If neither TERMINFO nor TERMINFO_DIRS is set, the last place tried will
         be the system terminfo directory, /usr/share/terminfo.

  It doesn't mention /etc/terminfo or /lib/terminfo.
  Thankfully I ran across command 'ncurses5-config --terminfo-dirs' which shows:
  /etc/terminfo:/lib/terminfo:/usr/share/terminfo
  or I would not have found /etc/terminfo/README which gives the 'good oil' :

  This directory is for system-local terminfo descriptions. By default,
  ncurses will search ${HOME}/.terminfo first, then /etc/terminfo (this
  directory), then /lib/terminfo, and last not least /usr/share/terminfo.

  # dpkg-query -S /usr/share/man/man5/terminfo.5.gz
  ncurses-bin: /usr/share/man/man5/terminfo.5.gz
  root at ausyvutims1:/usr/share/man

  # apt-cache policy ncurses-bin
  ncurses-bin:
    Installed: 5.9-4
    Candidate: 5.9-4
    Version table:
   *** 5.9-4 0
          500 http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ precise/main amd64 Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

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