xterm: erase and delete, the neverending story

[miquels@cistron.nl (Miquel van Smoorenburg)]

Well, it worked for some time, but somehow my delete and erase key
got mixed up again (the never ending story it seems). With a current
potato, lets start a clean xterm (empty environment and homedir) :

$ xhost +local:
non-network local connections being added to access control list
$ env -i HOME=/ DISPLAY=:0 /usr/bin/X11/xterm

[in the fresh xterm] :

traveler% stty -a
speed 9600 baud; rows 24; columns 80; line = 0;
intr = ^C; quit = ^\; erase = ^?; kill = ^U; eof = ^D; eol = <undef>;
eol2 = <undef>; start = ^Q; stop = ^S; susp = ^Z; rprnt = ^R; werase = ^W;
lnext = ^V; flush = ^O; min = 1; time = 0;

traveler% cat
hello^H^H^H^H^H
hello
traveler% 

As you can see, my backspace key returns the ^H code, but the
terminal settings are initialized to reckognize DEL as erase.

Now the DELETE code on my keypad returns ^? [del], but that also
isn't quite right as the terminfo database claims it is something
else:

traveler% infocmp | grep kdch1
        kdch1=\E[3~, kend=\EOF, kent=\EOM, kf1=\EOP, kf10=\E[21~, 

as you can see, it should return ESC [3~ or terminfo should be
updated.

In fact, none of the escape codes that xterm sends correspond
to what the terminfo database says. Like insert, home, end, etc.
The xterm-debian entry lives in /etc/terminfo/x/xterm, and comes from:

traveler% dpkg -S xterm-debian 
ncurses-base: /etc/terminfo/x/xterm-debian
ncurses-base: /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-debian
traveler% dpkg -s ncurses-base
Package: ncurses-base
Essential: yes
Status: install ok installed
Priority: required
Section: base
Installed-Size: 75
Maintainer: Galen Hazelwood <galenh@debian.org>
Source: ncurses
Version: 4.2-3.4

Is this a known bug? In the xterm package ? It seems that all
potato workstations at the company have this problem.

Mike.
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