Serious (ha-ha) bug in 4.9-RELEASE

Erik Trulsson ertr1013 at student.uu.se
Tue Nov 4 05:28:39 PST 2003


On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 07:37:05AM -0500, Brian T. Schellenberger wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Monday 03 November 2003 07:06 pm, Erik Trulsson wrote:
> | On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 03:50:57PM -0800, Chris Pressey wrote:
> | > On Tue, 4 Nov 2003 00:17:26 +0100
> | >
> | > Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> | > > I am quite certain it is a local problem at your end.
> | >
> | > Seems odd that it would be affecting my system as well, then :)
> |
> | Alright, so I was mistaken.  It is not a local problem.
> |
> | > > What value is your TERM environment variable set to?
> | >
> | > # echo $TERM
> | > xterm
> | >
> | > Note that the problem doesn't show up for me under cons25.
> |
> | Yeah, I noticed.  Eventually.
> |
> | > The md5 hash of my /usr/share/misc/termcap is identical to the one given
> | > in the previous message.
> | >
> | > I have no idea.
> |
> | It seems that the termcap entry for xterm was substantially changed
> | between 4.8-release and 4.9-release.
> | One change was the removal of of the "bs" capability which
> | /usr/games/hack requires.  That capability is documented as being
> | obsolete and that programs shouldn't depend on it, so it seems that the
> | bug is in /usr/games/hack rather than termcap.
> 
> Well, perhaps, but was there some particular *benefit* to removing the "bs" 
> capability?  It seems sort of perverse / unexpected to remove functionality, 
> even old/depricated functionality, unless it's doing some harm, especially on 
> a "point release."  (Removing it from 4.x to 5.x wouldn't seem so 
> surprising.)

I haven't checked, but one possible benefit might be to get the
description to fit into the 1023-character limit that termcap imposes.
I imagine that the xterm-descriptions lie very close to this limit.
I.e. to add the "bs" capability might require removing some other
capability that is of greater use.


Besides, ever since it was first imported into FreeBSD back in 1994,
the termcap(5) has always documented the "bs" capability as being
obsolete, and that new programs shouldn't use it.  I guess it was just
assumed that no program used it any more.  Since this seems to be the
first time anybody has complained about it, it guess it was a
reasonable assumption.

For old programs, one can always use the xterm-r6 or xterm-r5 termcap
descriptions, which are supposed to be compatible with the xterm
descriptions in old releases of X. (Both of which does have the "bs"
capability, but probably lacks many features of newer xterms.)
This is probably enough to cater for backwards compatibility.


> 
> OTOH, the fact that nobody seems to have noticed until after 4.9 was released 
> is a pretty strong argument that not very many people care--unless of 
> course  :-)
> 
> I checked the CVS respository, and this change seems to have been made *six* 
> months ago:

Yep.  It doesn't seem as if there are all that many people who run
/usr/games/hack in an xterm.


-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se


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