Re: Trying to fix slang
On Wed, Jan 30, 2002 at 04:57:12PM -0800, Blars Blarson wrote:
> Not changing the terminal name when you change the terminal definition
> breaks things worse. When I log into a linux box from a solaris or
> AIX xterm window, the xterm terminal type just doesn't work. It seems
> that the xfree86 people didn't think about the problems caused by
> their incompatibilities in a mixed environment. (I'd file a bug on
> this, but at this late date fixing it would cause more headakes than
> it would solve.)
Putting the character set in the terminal type isn't a good solution.
Enabling UTF-8 as a user should be as simple as changing LANG or
LC_ALL and possibly telling your terminal about it (if applicable).
Adding different terminal types into the mix where they don't belong
will just make a mess of things.
The charset is a property of the terminal, but it's independant of the
rest of the terminal definition. Just like most terminals can be of any
width, many terminals can be any charset. (And UTF-8 shouldn't be an
exception; "if it's UTF-8, you need to put "-utf8" in TERM, but not for
any other terminal"? That would drive some people away from UTF-8
alone.)
The basic problem is that there's little relation between the terminal
definition and the locale (they're copmletely different systems), but
there *is* some overlap (such as here, with ACS.)
It might be sufficient (not ideal) to put this stuff directly into
ncurses and slang; if the charset is UTF-8, adjust accordingly (that is,
do it at a higher level than terminfo.) It's unideal because there are
probably a few apps that use terminfo directly and parse acsc directly,
but I can't name any off-hand.
The xterm problems are due to actual incompatibilities between versions of
xterm, due to, IMO, poor judgement on the part of X; they probably should
have done something like versioned the xterm terminal name. (This stuff
drives crazy anyone trying to write a terminal using xterm's terminal
definition; I know it's given the Putty people headaches.)
--
Glenn Maynard
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