the terminfo db. An example of the problems arising is: dtterm is an acceptable terminal name for programs compiled with ncurses but not for those compiled with termcap. Moreover, I see that redhat links programs that reside on the root partition with -ltermcap and everything else with ncurses. Why don't you just nuke termcap completely and use the ncurses feature to embed in the library the description of the linux console?
Termcap is used, in general for things that might be used if there is no /usr mounted; ncurses is not installed on the root partition.