Bug#404079: display problem with xterm + screen and bold characters

[Vincent Lefevre <vincent@vinc17.org>]

Package: xterm
Version: 223-1
Severity: important

Not sure this is a bug in xterm, but the following problems don't occur
with rxvt.

Xterm doesn't behave correctly when there are bold characters in screen,
when using TERM=xterm-debian or TERM=xterm-xfree86, but no problem when
using TERM=xterm. It seems to be a regression (as I didn't notice this
problem before), but I'm not sure.

For instance, ssh to a Debian/stable machine, start "screen", with the
zsh shell. Set the following prompts:

  PS1="%{`tput bold`%}%% %{`tput sgr0`%}"
  RPS1="abc"

Hit [Enter] a few times and type "true", and hit [Enter] again a few
times, to have:

%                                                                           abc
%                                                                           abc
% true                                                                      abc
%                                                                           abc
%                                                                           abc

Detach the screen session and reattach it. I get:

%                                                                           bc
%                                                                           bc
% rue                                                                      abc
%                                                                           bc
%                                                                           bc

Same problem after a ssh to Mac OS X, but only with TERM=xterm-debian.
Note: like Debian/stable, Mac OS X uses ncurses 5.4.

This problem makes xterm quite unusable with screen.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-3-686-bigmem
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)

Versions of packages xterm depends on:
ii  libc6                        2.3.6.ds1-9 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libfontconfig1               2.4.2-1     generic font configuration library
ii  libice6                      1:1.0.1-2   X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libncurses5                  5.5-5       Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii  libsm6                       1:1.0.1-3   X11 Session Management library
ii  libx11-6                     2:1.0.3-4   X11 client-side library
ii  libxaw7                      1:1.0.2-4   X11 Athena Widget library
ii  libxext6                     1:1.0.1-2   X11 miscellaneous extension librar
ii  libxft2                      2.1.8.2-8   FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii  libxmu6                      1:1.0.2-2   X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii  libxt6                       1:1.0.2-2   X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii  xbitmaps                     1.0.1-2     Base X bitmaps

Versions of packages xterm recommends:
ii  xutils                      1:7.1.ds.3-1 X Window System utility programs

-- no debconf information