-- $Id: README,v 1.3 2007/01/27 23:14:19 tom Exp $

The 'tack' program is a diagnostic that is designed to create and verify the correctness of terminfo's. This program can be used to create new terminal descriptions that are not included in the standard release. Although 'tack' has been distributed with ncurses, it is not an integral part of ncurses. It may be removed from the release without limiting the usefulness of ncurses on those terminals described in the terminfo data base. The best way to remove 'tack' from the build is to delete or rename the 'tack' directory before running the configure script.

Starting with ncurses 5.6 patch 20070113, this program can be built outside the ncurses source-tree, provided that ncurses is configured using the "--with-ticlib" option. That makes available the private interfaces used by tack, and eliminates the need to distribute tack as an optional part of ncurses.

Unlike the rest of ncurses, the 'tack' program is covered under the GNU Public License.