Serious (ha-ha) bug in 4.9-RELEASE

[Erik Trulsson]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 07:49:36AM -0800, Michael Sierchio wrote:
> Brian T. Schellenberger wrote:
> 
> 
> >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  :-)
> 
> Arrrrghhhh!  It was a stupid fscking idea to make
> arbitrary changes to something that hadn't really changed
> in a decade (or more).

I don't think the changes were exactly arbitrary.
>From the comments in termcap.src I would say that the new version seems
to be based (quite closely) on the termcap desctriptions supplied by
the XFree86 people.  From browsing their CVS repository it seems they
dropped the "bs" capability from their xterm entry some 7 years ago.
It has also been in 4-STABLE for about 6 months (and in -CURRENT for
about 7 months before that), so it is not exactly as if it was a new
and untested change that made it into 4.9-RELEASE.

Many people wanted support for various new features in xterm (like
support for color in a standard xterm.)
To get those, the termcap entry needed to be updated.
The easiest (and least bug-prone) way of doing that seems to be to
import the termcap entries provided by XFree86 (who, after all, should
know what xterm looks like.)

> 
> And I don't track -STABLE on all machines, so this change
> didn't appear in RELENG_4_8.

The changes were made after 4.8-RELEASE, so they wouldn't have appeared
in RELENG_4_8.

> 
> Especially since it affects such a *critical* application ;-)

Very critical indeed...  And with such a huge userbase that it took six
months before anybody noticed this problem.  :-)

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