old/unupdated xterm entries in termcap db

[Ed Schouten]

Hello Alexander, others,

* Alexander Leidinger <Alexander at Leidinger.net> wrote:
> The practical attitude should be coordinated with ed@ (CCed), as he
> switched the console in 9-current to be an xterm, and AFAIR it does
> not support as much colors as the real xterm. Maybe there is a
> reason to not update it.

So the idea is to make TERM=xterm use 256 colors? Even though I think
having more colors would be awesome, I think many things would break.
For example:

- As Alexander mentioned, our console driver doesn't support more than
  16 (well, 8 on the background) colors. Fortunately our implementation
  in HEAD smashes down the 256 colors back to 8, so it shouldn't cause
  any serious artifacts. Just a slight inconvenience.

- I know Apple's Terminal.app for example doesn't support 256 colors and
  badly misinterprets the escape sequences, causing portions of the
  screen to blink (because the sequence to switch to one of the extended
  colors contains a 5, which is blink).

But if someone is interested in updating the entries in the termcap file
to something newer (but no 256 colors), please do! Patches welcome! I
will even MFC it! Our current entry for xterm isn't entirely compatible
with Apple's Terminal.app either. I've noticed that an Erase Line (EL,
^[[K) with xterm uses the terminal's selected attributes to blank the
terminal, while Apple's implementation uses the default terminal
attributes (i.e. black background).

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
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