standards/47454: terminfo(5) does not have a capability for terminal/display character set

[fair%netbsd.org@localhost]

>Number:         47454
>Category:       standards
>Synopsis:       terminfo(5) does not have a capability for terminal/display 
>character set
>Confidential:   no
>Severity:       serious
>Priority:       high
>Responsible:    standards-manager
>State:          open
>Class:          change-request
>Submitter-Id:   net
>Arrival-Date:   Tue Jan 15 21:20:01 +0000 2013
>Originator:     Erik E. Fair
>Release:        NetBSD 6.0_STABLE
>Organization:
        The NetBSD Project
>Environment:
        
        
System: NetBSD cesium.clock.org 6.0_STABLE NetBSD 6.0_STABLE (V240) #4: Sat Dec 
1 19:39:37 PST 2012 
root%rubidium.clock.org@localhost:/var/obj/sys/arch/sparc64/compile/V240 sparc64
Architecture: sparc64
Machine: sparc64
>Description:
        One key piece of information from the terminal display capabilities
        of terminfo(5) is missing: a given terminal's character set.

        Given UNIX's origins in the USA, we've had American Standard Code for
        Information Interchange (ASCII, a.k.a. US-ASCII) as the system default
        assumption since its creation, but now NetBSD (Unix's successor) is
        being used in many countries with multiple character sets (e.g.
        ISO-8859-1, ISO-2022-JP, KOI8-R, ISO-10646 (UTF-8)), and in
        multi-lingual text processing applications where international
        capability in the base system is required.

        The POSIX locale LANG environment variable doesn't quite do it, and
        can be in conflict with what the user's terminal can actually display,
        whether that be an xterm(1) (or something that emulates it like MacOS
        X's "Terminal" application), or wsdisplay(4). Programs that handle
        multiple labelled character sets (e.g. less(1), Mail User Agents:
        Mail, pine, elm, nmh, etc) and need to match or convert character sets
        for display need this information to prevent violation of the
        "Principle of Least Astonishment."

        At minimum, anything that sets the TERM environment variable ought to
        also set LANG as appropriate to the capabilities of the display.

.How-To-Repeat:
        <code/input/activities to reproduce the problem (multiple lines)>
>Fix:
        

>Unformatted: