TERM=gnome - a possible way out

Chris Adams cmadams at hiwaay.net
Wed Aug 4 17:24:10 UTC 2004


Once upon a time, Michal Jaegermann <michal at harddata.com> said:
> I got an idea.  What about creating a new terminal type
> 'xterm-gnome' which will be just an alias to 'gnome' and setting
> TERM to that?  After all 'gnome' is just a slight extension of
> 'xterm'.  There is a hope that most other installations seeing
> unknown 'xterm*' will reduce that to 'xterm' anyway.  I am not
> sure how this will fare in practice but the current havoc
> should be somewhat reduced.

The problem with any new term type is interoperability with other
systems (both other Linux and other Unix systems).  I already loaded the
last ESR terminfo file into my Tru64 and Solaris servers (and then use
TERM=xterm-xfree86 to get the desired functionality).  I don't really
want to have to go around and load additional entries on top of that
(where would be the canonical place to download these entries?).

Are you going to release an ncurses errata for RHEL to add this terminfo
entry?  If not, then the change won't interoperate with the installed
base of RHEL for years to come (since for example RHEL 3 is support for
another 4 years or so).

If there is a big gain to making the change, go for it.  If it is just a
small difference that a lot of people won't even see, forget it.  TERM
is something very important to those of us that use a system as more
than a "closed box" (i.e. use terminals to access a shell on other
servers).

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.





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