Re: How backspace is broken in Debian
On Wed, 25 Mar 1998, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> But calling two different terminals 'rxvt' makes it impossible for me
> to run them both on my system and get adequate results. It loses all
> the advantages of termcap/terminfo.
> To clarify my point, if both terminals (ie., Debian and the usual
> one) call themselves rxvt, I cannot compensate for this using scripts
> like the above or by providing my own terminfo. If one calls itself
> rxvt-debian and the other calls itself rxvt, the _worst_ I'll ever
> have to do is simply change my TERM conditionally back to rxvt. But,
> if the target system (perhaps a Debian one) already has termcaps for
> rxvt and rxvt-debian, it will support either terminal flawlessly.
> What are the problems that make this undesirable?
You can do this already. You can start all of your rxvt windows on
your Debian system with the option -tn rxvt-debian to have TERM
automatically set to rxvt-debian. This will work well for you because
you have worked to set everything up on all of your accounts to
anticipate such a TERM value. A less sophisticated user will not have
done this, and I shall have to explain to him why everything complains
about an "unknown terminal" when he rlogins onto his Sun account (or
even worse, his account on a Red Hat system).
In general, I think that we should try to remain compatibile. This is
why I have strived to configure the default rxvt provided by Debian
(the small, "xterm-like" rxvt) in as a plain vanilla state as possible,
while still adhering to Debian's high standards. The rxvt terminfo
entry in ncurses-base is the standard rxvt entry. I know, since I sent
it to the ncurses-base maintainer. It is straight from the upstream
rxvt sources, with only a slight modification to bring it in line with
Debian's backspace policy.
In conclusion, I have convinced myself that rxvt's behavior should be
modified to make it compatible with the capabilities specified in the
terminfo entry. Rxvt will send different escape sequences for HOME and
END than the Linux console, but that should be fine, since these escape
sequence are also different from those used by xterm.
Brian
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