A proposal

[Frank J. Wancho <FJW @ MIT-MC>]

Tom's plea for help with adding terminal types prompted me to throw in
a suggestion that would probably add a small bit of confusion to the
already convoluted numbering scheme cause by having versions of TECO
mixed with versions of EMACS on top of TECO.

What I propose is that the entire section of TECO that deals with
terminal specifications be extracted from TECO.MID and maintained
separately as an .INSRT file, with its own version numbering.

Why?  Because we can isolate changes to TECO proper from simply an
addition of yet another terminal type.  TECO.MID is huge.  It has been
somewhat less than encouraging to FTP the entire file and run a SRCCOM
to find nothing new in TECO except that someone added support for a
new terminal.  By separating the terminal support section, we can
determine this in advance and pick up whichever is the latest.

Furthermore, I would like to propose that both files, once separated,
be considered a base, and that a change history be prepended to the
front of each for each new version from that point.

Lastly, I would like to determine if anybody's "permission" is
required to make the following change: I would like to insert
conditional code for the minority of TENEX sites to revert the
handling of the "EOL" character.  Several versions back, someone
changed that section for TOPS-20 sites, and made it unuseable for
TENEX sites.  I'd like to put it back in the distributed version so I
don't have to make local mods for each new version created, and save
other TENEX sites the trouble to figure out that they would have to
make the same changes.

Comments?

--Frank