On Tue, 2005-23-08 at 21:27 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 8:52:13 +0200 "Kevin F. Quinn" > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > | On 21/8/2005 23:05:05, Ciaran McCreesh ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote: > | > Now the proposal. This isn't something that can happen immediately, > | > but it's something I'd like to see us working towards: > | > > | > [...] > | > > | > * De-cripple the standard xterm definition and remove restrictions > | > from programs which can make full use of xterm's capabilities. > | > | This bit, obviously, has to wait until at least the more common > | packages have been adjusted for their own TERM value. In the > | interim, how about creating a 'xtermstd' entry with the de-crippled > | definition, and altering the (presumably few) packages that supply > | fully-compatible xterms to use that, with a view to changing them > | back to 'xterm' later once the rest of the world is in line. > | > | I think it's also worth considering leaving the existing xterm entry > | crippled, and just accept that abuse of it is too entrenched and > | widespread to fix. > > Hrm, I'd really rather not do that, on the grounds that it's a nasty > hack and that it encourages people to carry on abusing TERM. By leaving > xterm crippled in the long term, we're in effect saying "it's ok to > pretend to be an xterm", which it isn't.
I though about this thing last night, and frankly, I think its a lost cause. I remember that during the Gnome 1.x era, gnome-terminal used to set TERM=gnome (at least it did on Red Hat) and they had the proper termcap/terminfo entries. But they ended up going back to TERM=xterm, probably because it caused problems for their users, like login into anything else and being reduced to the lowest possible common denominator (like logging into a Solaris system and being reduced to non-visual mode by vi). And by the way, Solaris 2.8 still does not know about rxvt. As a gnome-terminal user, I've never had problems with anything that tried to use advanced xterm crap... probably because no uses them. If you want X stuff, just use a real X application (like gvim...). I'm strictly opposed to crippling my terminal use in the most common cases (such a logging into a non-Gentoo system) for one or two legacy applications. In the era of massive sshing, we have to forget terminfo and new terminal types. We should understand xterm to mean a basic x terminal and not the application from X.org. -- Olivier Crête [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gentoo Developer x86 Security Liaison -- [email protected] mailing list
