Re: pkg/29275: devel/ncurses has missing terminfo details for xterm

[Peter Bex <Peter.Bex%student.kun.nl@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2005 at 03:36:51AM +0000, Johnny C. Lam wrote:
> This patch modifies the "xterm-r6" entry to include the civis and
> cvvis definitions.  This "fixes" the problem because the "xterm" entry
> is just a clone of "xterm-r6".  There are two other things we can do:
> 
>     (1) Modify the "xterm" entry to clone "xterm-xfree86" instead, which
>       does have the civis and cvvis definitions, and which should work
>       with the XFree86 distributed with NetBSD.  This would also
>       require a PKGREVISION bump of ncurses.
> 
>     (2) Tell the user to set TERM=xterm-xfree86 in the shell environment.

I'd like to add another option for consideration:

(3) Change our xterm to export TERM=xterm-xfree86 by default.

Of course, this may cause problems when remotely logging in to another
system which doesn't know about XFree86, but it does fix the problem in
an (IMHO) rather clean way.  The essence of the problem is that everybody
calls something different by the same name, `xterm'.

Changing the xterm option to something else could also be done based on the
system (option (1)).  This would require a bsd.ncurses.mk/bsd.xterm.mk file
for every supported OS in pkgsrc.  (this is a simple sed operation, of course)

Maybe we should also have a look at the native NetBSD curses termcap,
it has the vs/vi entries too, which would break if someone would login
from a system which has an older type xterm.

Regards,
Peter