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

["Erik E. Fair" <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR standards/47454; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: "Erik E. Fair" <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: standards-manager%netbsd.org@localhost, netbsd-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost
Subject: Re: standards/47454: terminfo(5) does not have a capability for 
terminal/display character set
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2013 09:25:43 -0800

 Unix has to know what your terminal can do, a priori, for those programs which
 attempt to manipulate it in any way (e.g. vi, emacs, clear, less; i.e. anything
 linked with terminfo(3) or curses(3), hell any program that #includes
 <termios.h> or uses the TIOC* ioctl(2) system calls)) to succeed. The failure
 mode caused by a mismatch between what Unix thinks your terminal is or can do
 from the TERM environment variable (sometimes set from /etc/ttys or provided
 by remote login programs like ssh) is old and well known/understood: "this
 doesn't look right."
 
 This follows to character set display capability. We're lucky in that ASCII
 is the base assumption of Unix, and that ASCII is also a proper subset of a
 large number of character sets (e.g. ISO-8859-1, ISO-2022-JP, UTF-8). You're
 really going to lose very badly if the character set your terminal uses does
 not have ASCII as a subset - given how common ASCII is, *everything* has to
 be converted (e.g. run through iconv(1)) before display, i.e. you very probably
 can't just "cat a file" [to the tty] unless that file is in your terminal's
 character set.
 
 The implication for terminals described by terminfo which have downloadable
 fonts is that there will have to be terminal names that are a tuple of what
 it is and the current character set (e.g. "vt200-koi8-r"), and every time a
 different character set is downloaded, the TERM environment variable must
 change for programs to be able to do the right thing. You're still stuck with
 this situation now: you still have to change the LANG environment variable
 when the terminal character set is changed.
 
 What I'm trying to argue is that character set is a capability or
 characteristic of the terminal (interface) one uses to Unix, and therefore
 terminfo (or termcap) is the database in which we describe such things.
 
 Semantically, LANG is similar but not the same, in that its intention is to
 describe (in part) what language, and with the other locale variables, what
 cultural assumptions you have (e.g. sort(1) ordering of characters, commas
 instead of periods for denoting the end of the integer part of a number and
 the beginning of the decimal fraction, ordering the components of a date).
 
        Erik <fair%netbsd.org@localhost>