Re: [gentoo-dev] Fixing the TERM mess

[Olivier Crete]

On Tue, 2005-23-08 at 21:27 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Aug 2005 8:52:13 +0200 "Kevin F. Quinn"
> <kevquinn@g.o> wrote:
> | On 21/8/2005 23:05:05, Ciaran McCreesh (ciaranm@g.o) 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
tester@g.o
Gentoo Developer
x86 Security Liaison


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