dircolors - debian etch - broken by design?

[Chris Jones <cjns1989@gmail.com>]

I have had problems with the legibility of some of the default ls colors
and figured it would take a quick read of the fine manual(s) and a bit
of tweaking to change them.

Well .. about four (!) hours and a lot of frustration later .. I have
not been able to change the default settings.

My .bashrc has the usual:

  eval `dircolors -b` 

I thought this was supposed to set the LS_COLORS variable to a string of
default coloring sequences that would be used by ls when run with the
--color=[auto|always] flag ..

So I figured I just needed to issue a "dircolors -p .dircolors" .. edit
the .dircolors file to my liking .. and then follow up with a "dircolors
-b .dircolors" and that should do it, right?

Well .. in an xterm .. whatever I do ..

  echo $LS_COLORS 

.. tells me that .. (1) LS_COLORS is set - if I type "$LS_COL + tab":
the shell is able to complete the variable and therefore "knows" about
it ..  and .. (2) that it is set to nothing printable ..  presumably an
empty string ..

Eventually, after hours of fruitless googling (which only revealed that
scores of applicants had been denied in the same way - nothing close to
half a solution) ..  and "testing" .. if you can call it that .. I
managed to calm down a bit :-) .. and I figured that dircolors is
probably broken..  

So I commented the above eval out of my .bashrc ..  and sure 'nuff ..
the next shell I started had all the default escape strings in the
LS_COLORS variable..!!!

When I run "dircolors -p" or even "strings $(which dircolors)" .. I
notice that there are a bunch of what look like supported terminfo
entries right at the beginning of all the hard-coded (!) stuff and that
well.. neither the xterm-256color or screen-256color-bce that I use on
my home machine are in there.. 

I strongly suspect that this may have something to do with my problem.

So, it looks like my options at this point are that I can either patch
(rewrite?) dircolors .. or just ignore it and code all my ls coloring
sequences in an "export LS_COLORS=" statement by hand?

Please advise.

Thanks!

CJ