Re: eterm: Home and End don't work
On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 04:09:10PM -0700, Adam McKenna wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2001 at 05:27:37PM -0500, Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> > Au contrair, it usually does.
>
> Only when it tells how to actually fix the problem, not that the maintainer
> plans to fix the problem in some later release. If the maintainer doesn't
> plan to fix the problem until a later release, he should leave the bug open,
> and close it after the problem is fixed.
No, unless I'm misreading that bug report badly, that's not what it
says. He said in the bug report he would fix it in a future release,
and in the README.Debian to copy the terminfo. But I can't check from
here, so I may be mistaken.
> > > As far as the Eterm terminfo entry, this is not sufficient for anyone who is
> > > not running unstable on every box. Some of us actually need to be able to
> > > login to machines of different architechtures and have things work. Just
> > > because upstream did something braindead doesn't mean that Debian users
> > > should have to suffer.
> >
> > Care to present an alternative? Documenting this problem seems to be
> > the only reasonable solution, every time it appears, usually re xterm
> > itself.
>
> The problem here is that they are using their own terminal entry, one which
> is not present in standard ncurses 5.2. The Eterm homepage mentions
> something about the "new" ncurses, which will supposedly add support for
> their terminal, but the current ncurses is almost a year old, so when is this
> fabled new version coming out?
I assume you noticed that this is wrong; apt-get install ncurses-term.
It's just not a 'common' terminfo.
> > It's in ncurses-term. Eterm will need to depend on ncurses-term, or
> > request that it be moved to ncurses-base (which I'm not sure I want to
> > do).
>
> That still requires me to move Eterm terminfo entries over to every
> non-Debian-sid system I wish to have a functional terminal on, or use the
> broken xterm emulation.
>
> Why is this so hard? There are plenty of other xterms on the market that
> seem to have this figured out. Why is it necessary for Eterm to reinvent the
> wheel?
The other xterms haven't got it figured out. Most of them squeak by by
being minimal, using term type xterm, and supporting exactly what xterm
does. Even then they hit a lot of holes. xterm's terminfo is not
consistent across versions, let alone across platforms, and claiming to
be 'xterm' doesn't really give you a good idea what you're getting.
Like I said, I'm musing over a better way. But requiring copying the
terminfo is pretty standard fare, and I'm glad to see eterm doing it
correctly - that is, by giving it its own accurate name, and not
claiming to be xterm.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz Debian GNU/Linux Developer
Monta Vista Software Debian Security Team
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