Re: terminals w/o UTF8 support (was Re: Bug#847809: ITP: tcvt -- multicolumn virtual terminal)

[George Gensure <werkt0@gmail.com>]

tl;dr: I'm on board.  popcon doesn't cover rclock, transition shouldn't drop it.  Worry about the number of rxvt-ml's out there for non-ascii compatible encodings.

On Mon, Dec 12, 2016 at 12:42 PM, Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> wrote:

I'd like to propose one migration:
let's replace "rxvt" and "rxvt-unicode" with dummy packages pulling current
"rxvt-unicode-256color" (renamed to the base name or not).  Same with
"aterm" whose changes have been merged into "rxvt-unicode" ages ago.  These
have non-negligible popcon thus should be transitioned.

Given the popcon for rxvt and its red-headed stepchild rxvt-ml, this transition to dummy needs to be seamless.  In addition to your usecase below (IRIX/Solaris/HPUX etc terminal branding), a lot of people turn to rxvt when *nothing else works* regarding sub-unicode/mc encodings - I want to make sure it continues to do so.
 

Preferences of this kind ossify and are hard to change, even nowadays you
have old people running rxvt because it's what they're used to.

Happy to be lumped into this 'old people' group.  Seriously, it's a bit flattering :)

 

Why -unicode, that's obvious.  Here's why -256color: thanks to a misdesign,
there's no way to detect 256 color support nor the used palette and trying
to use it when not supported results in visual breakage.  All other
terminals support that nowadays[2], thus programmers sometimes print 256
colors unconditionally.

My expectation is that, given the fork, subbing in for the venerable configs/args of rxvt will go relatively smoothly, whether to do with color or terminal behaviors, but at least params without parity should be backported/doc stubbed to keep people running.

Vanilla RXVT is dead upstream since 2001, that "new upstream" upload in 2013
was switching to a beta from 2003.

Agreed.  Beta was, iirc, an effort to mitigate a couple of years-old bug reports.
 

George (rxvt maintainer): would you be ok with this?

You're good on my part, if you need anything extra here, let me know.  As mentioned above, rxvt ships with rclock, and that binary should be ported (if it's not in rxvt-unicode already) or obsoleted in favor of xclock or some such.  The multichar variants were the last segment of the package to receive any attention, and they should continue to work in an rxvt-ml replacement if possible (by 'work' i mean not result in a missing binary on upgrade).

 

[1]. Indygo/Indy were made of pure awesomeness, especially their displays.

My first university independent project - get linux running on our Newport XL Indies ca. 2000.  Eventually made them into a render cluster.

-George