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what's up with xterm?



There seems to be a lot of ignorance regarding the reasons why xterm
adopted the "xterm-debian" terminal type by default in the first place.  It
was an issue discussed on the mailing lists and in the bug tracking system,
and a consensus was reached that it was the best solution to a bad
situation.  In essence there are two problems:

1) XFree86's xterm has some subtle incompatibilities with the X11R6.3 xterm
2) neither the Open Group's nor XFree86's xterm is compliant with Debian
keyboard policy by default

Of course it is up to the individual system administrator to decide which set
of problems he'd like to deal with; that is why Debian has three
(non-legacy) terminal types available for xterm: xterm, xterm-xfree86, and
xterm-debian.

After the Great Reorganization of the X packages, xterm's termName resource
is set in its app-defaults file (/usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/XTerm), not in
the /etc/X11/Xresources, which is now a directory.

This value may be overriden by adding an appropriate resource line to
/etc/X11/Xresources/xterm.  Note that resources set in the app-defaults
file do not propagate to remote $DISPLAYS, whereas resources read from
system or user resources files do.

I'd also like to move the default VT100 translations to the app-defaults
file, but because only one translation #override can be in effect at a
time, the best thing to do is to include an entire translation table in the
app-defaults file.

More information about these problems may be found at the X Strike Force
page, <http://master.debian.org/%7Ebranden/xsf.html>.

Any patches dealing with xterm should be applied to the xterm package, not
xbase.  Also, I realize the new xterm package needs some documentation
about these issues.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson              |      If you have the slightest bit of
Debian GNU/Linux                 |      intellectual integrity you cannot
branden@ecn.purdue.edu           |      support the government.
cartoon.ecn.purdue.edu/~branden/ |      -- anonymous

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