Re: Trying to fix slang
On Wed, 2002-01-30 at 12:04, Glenn Maynard wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 11:48:22AM +0000, Phil Blundell wrote:
> > Your terminal emulator ought to do that for you. And it seems like a
> > perfectly reasonable thing to do - graphics characters are absolutely
> > part of the terminal capability set.
>
> The character set is, in a sense, part of the terminal definition. It
> does not belong in $TERM, however, any more than any other property.
> (This used to be done for some properties, ie. terminal width; this
> causes a mess--remnents of this are present in terminfo(5).)
I think maybe you misunderstood what I was saying.
I'm not suggesting that the character set should be somehow encoded into
the value of $TERM. Rather, I think that an xterm in UTF-8 mode and an
xterm in iso-8859-1 or whatever mode are simply different types of
terminal, and they should have different names.
> Don't forget that changing terminal names means breaking $TERM
> compatibility with every older system out there, too.
Sure, but adding UTF-8 support without changing $TERM silently breaks
runtime compatibility (by advertising an alternate character set that
doesn't actually work) which seems a great deal worse.
p.
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