Re: Cannot open termcap database

[Dan Nicolaescu <dann@ics.uci.edu>]

Mathias Dahl <mathias.dahl@gmail.com> writes:

  > On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 3:11 PM, A Soare <alinsoar@voila.fr> wrote:
  > > I tried to compile emacs for console, and I got the error
  > >
  > > Cannot open termcap database
  > >
  > >
  > > I solved the problem by installing ncurses-dev.
  > >
  > > One can introduce a check in ./configure.ac for the existence of terminfo data
  > > base when compiling for console and giving a suggestive error message?
  > 
  > I get bitten by this each time I compile and install Emacs on a new
  > Ubuntu GNU/Linux machine. Each time I have to surf around to
  > understand what to do about it. If it is possible for "us" to fix it
  > it would be nice.

configure could try to detect either the termcap or terminfo headers and
if none are present should error out.  All the systems we support
nowadays that use ttys have either termcap or terminfo, so we don't lose
anything.