AFAICT, the output of "infocmp -L" should be processable by
"tic" to reproduce the terminfo entry in that tic seems to
understand those long capability names, and it works in practice
for some terminfo entries but only those where none of those
capabilities contain backslash characters as with "-L" it seems
those backslashes are not escaped as \\.
Example:
OK for vt100:
$ ./infocmp -x1 vt100 | grep -F '\\'
$ ./infocmp -x1 vt100 | tic -cx -
$
But for xterm-256color:
$ ./infocmp -V
ncurses 6.6.20260301
$ ./infocmp -x1 xterm-256color| grep -F '\\'
initc=\E]4;%p1%d;rgb:%p2%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p3%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X/%p4%{255}%*%{1000}%/%2.2X\E\\,
rv=\E\\[>41;[1-6][0-9][0-9];0c,
xr=\EP>\\|XTerm\\(([1-9][0-9]+)\\)\E\\\\,
$ ./infocmp -Lx1 xterm-256color| grep -F '\\'
xr=\EP>\|XTerm\(([1-9][0-9]+)\)\E\\,
$ ./infocmp -x1 xterm-256color| tic -cx -
$ ./infocmp -Lx1 xterm-256color| tic -cx -
"<stdin>", line 295, col 15, terminal 'xterm-256color': Illegal character '['
in \ sequence
"<stdin>", line 298, col 24, terminal 'xterm-256color': Illegal character '('
in \ sequence
"<stdin>", line 298, col 39, terminal 'xterm-256color': Illegal character ')'
in \ sequence
Here, we get an error, but it could also cause corruption like
when the output has "foo=\,bar=/," instead of "foo=\\,bar/," as
tic would interpret it as a "foo" capability with ",bar=/" as
value.
I came across the issue when trying to compile the terminfo
entry shown at
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/804811/less-doesnt-let-me-type-after-using-to-search
where I got a bogus result because of some \, in there.
The "comparison" output (as in infocmp term1 term2) also seems
to be affected.
While it's not one that is intended to be processed by tic, not
doing that escaping produces potentially ambiguous output.
For example, if you see \\E you don't know whether it's two
backslashes and a E or a backslash and ESC.
Best regards,
Stephane
