Package: xterm Version: 398-1 Severity: normal Tags: l10n Dear Maintainer,
I upgraded to Debian 13 the other day, and afterwards, switching to/from UTF-8 text in xterm behaves differently. I made a test vector with both UTF-8 and iso8859-1 in it: % xxd xterm_test 00000000: 7574 6638 3a20 2fc3 a52f c3a4 2fc3 b62f utf8: /../../../ 00000010: e280 932f 0a6c 6174 696e 313a 202f e52f .../.latin1: /./ 00000020: e42f f62f 2d2f 0a ././-/. Here are some steps which show the issue: 1. % LANG=C.utf8 LC_ALL=C.utf8 xterm -> the xterm Ctrl-right button menu shows "UTF-8 Encoding" enabled and greyed out (not possible to change) -> the new shell has C.utf8 locale -> 'cat xterm_test' renders the UTF-8 text properly 2. % LANG=sv_SE LC_ALL=sv_SE xterm -> the xterm menu shows "UTF-8 Encoding" disabled but possible to enable -> the new shell has sv_SE locale -> 'cat xterm_test' does not render the UTF-8 text properly; renders the latin1 ok instead 3. Select "UTF-8 Encoding" in that menu. -> 'cat xterm_test' still does not render the UTF-8 text properly; renders the latin1 instead 4. Run 'reset' in the shell. -> 'cat xterm_test' now renders the UTF-8 text properly. 5. Deselect "UTF-8 Encoding" again in the menu. -> 'cat xterm_test' does not render the UTF-8 text properly. 6. Select "UTF-8 Encoding" again in the menu. -> 'cat xterm_test' renders the UTF-8 text properly. So it seems that if you start out with a non-UTF-8 xterm but want to switch to UTF-8, you need to both select "UTF-8 Encoding" in the menu and run reset(1) in the terminal. After that, you can switch back and forth using only the menu. I'm pretty sure this is a change compared to Debian 12 and earlier. I.e. step 3 would have shown the UTF-8 text, with no need for step 4. I will be able to confirm that, but not until Saturday when I have access to a Debian 12 system. I should probably also disclose that I do my daily terminal work in sv_SE, i.e. a non-utf8 locale. I have 35 years' worth of iso8859-1 data which I don't fancy converting. I only switch to a UTF-8 locale when I ssh to the host where I read my mail. I open a new xterm dedicated to this, use the xterm menu to select "UTF-8 Encoding" and "UTF-8 Fonts", and then: % LANG=sv_SE.UTF-8 LC_CTYPE=sv_SE.UTF-8 ssh -t aphanes mutt Aphanes runs OpenBSD, thus the odd locale names. Anyway this should not be relevant to my problem -- unless you feel starting a non-UTF-8 xterm is unsupported. BR, /Jörgen -- System Information: Debian Release: 13.2 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Kernel: Linux 6.12.57+deb13-amd64 (SMP w/12 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=sv_SE, LC_CTYPE=sv_SE (charmap=ISO-8859-1), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system) Versions of packages xterm depends on: ii libc6 2.41-12 ii libfontconfig1 2.15.0-2.3 ii libfreetype6 2.13.3+dfsg-1 ii libice6 2:1.1.1-1 ii libtinfo6 6.5+20250216-2 ii libutempter0 1.2.1-4 ii libx11-6 2:1.8.12-1 ii libxaw7 2:1.0.16-1 ii libxext6 2:1.3.4-1+b3 ii libxft2 2.3.6-1+b4 ii libxinerama1 2:1.1.4-3+b4 ii libxmu6 2:1.1.3-3+b4 ii libxpm4 1:3.5.17-1+b3 ii libxt6t64 1:1.2.1-1.2+b2 ii xbitmaps 1.1.1-2.2 Versions of packages xterm recommends: ii luit [luit] 2.0.20240910-1 ii x11-utils 7.7+7 Versions of packages xterm suggests: pn xfonts-cyrillic <none> -- no debconf information
