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Re: Bug#9813: rxvt 2.20-4 : Bad setting of TERM environ variable



>From the original bug report by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>:

> rxvt-xpm, at least, is setting TERM to be xterm.  It should be set to
> "rxvt".  Debian's termcap/terminfo (as well as that of every other Linux and
> many other modern OSs as well) has an rxvt entry, and it should be used in
> this situation.

rxvt (and rxvt-xpm) always exports the variable "COLORTERM" so that programs 
can check for color support.  As a side note, when XPM support has been 
compiled into rxvt (as with rxvt-xpm supplied in Debian's rxvt package), the 
value of COLORTERM is set to "rxvt-xpm" instead of "rxvt".

> If for some reason that is not possible, at a minimum, xterm-color should be
> used.  Otherwise, programs fail to recognize the color capabilities of rxvt
> and do not display in the best manner possible.

Note that xterm from xbase version 3.2 sets TERM to xterm, and not 
xterm-color, when color support has been enabled.  Perhaps the following line 
should be added to /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm-color:

*VT100*termName: xterm-color


I can rebuild rxvt to set TERM=xterm-color (there are not many differences 
between the terminfo entries for rxvt and xterm-color).  However, if we are to 
do things absolutely the correct way, I suppose that Debian should provide a 
"rxvt" terminfo entry and a "rxvt-color" entry (with color support as the only 
difference between the two).  Then rxvt would set TERM=rxvt-color when running 
on a display with Xdepth > 2 and TERM=rxvt otherwise.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Brian



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