Subject: Re: Recent termcap changes
To: William O Ferry <woferry@iname.com>
From: Julian Coleman <J.D.Coleman@newcastle.ac.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 05/03/2000 11:37:26
William O Ferry wrote:
> 	Out of curiosity, has anybody else been bit hard by the changes
> made in share/termcap/termcap.src recently?  I tend to connect to my
> NetBSD boxes either on a (now 1.4X) i386 at home, or from a Solaris 2.6
> machine at work, both via ssh in xterms (so the terminal is always
> xterm).  Since updating my machines to 1.4X all of them have become
> broken in their handling of highlighting and such.

This problem occurs because xterm takes the termcap entry and puts it into
the TERMCAP environment variable.  Unfortunately, it gets a truncated
entry, with certain capabilities missing.  Thus, the curses code thinks
that your terminal can't do bold or reverse or underline (or whatever).
The wordround is to unset TERMCAP in your environment.  I was thinking
that the fix is to stop xterm from generating a TERMCAP environment
variable in the first place.

> 	On the NetBSD box I use white-on-black text, and if I launch vi
> on one of my machines and cause a beep to occur (i.e. hit ESC one too
> many times) the screen will switch to black-on-white, and remain that
> way until I do a "Full Reset" in xterm again.

Hmm, strange.  Do you have termcap.src,v 1.57?  There was a problem with
the "default colours" sequence for xterm on previous versions.  Or, it
may be another symptom of the truncated TERMCAP.  Does it still do this
if you unset TERMCAP?

> 	So why did this change?  Considering that it's broken on boxes
> I control as well as ones I don't (and that always worked fine before
> this change as well as work with many other platforms I connect to on
> a daily basis) I'm inclined to think that xterm-xf86-v33 has some bad
> settings in it.  Can somebody who understands termcap please figure
> out what's wrong, or can we go back to the xterm-r6 that at least
> works?

This changed because the termcap entries that we used to ship don't contain
the extra attributes that are needed for colour and other enhancements.

J

-- 
                    My other computer also runs NetBSD
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