Serious (ha-ha) bug in 4.9-RELEASE

[Daniel Eischen]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Erik Trulsson wrote:

> 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.  :-)

No, we noticed it here at work where we use Sun Solaris
boxes as our development systems.  I didn't know what the
problem was until now.  It is very very annoying to have
man, more, less, etc, screw up your display when using
them while remotely logged in to our FreeBSD boxes.  The
symptoms are that everything gets highlighted and underlined
and it stays that way forcing you to close the xterm and
open another.  If we set TERM to xterm-r6 or xterm-r5, then
everything seems to work OK.

I hate how xterm defaults to color-capable.  If it were
only up to me, it wouldn't.

-- 
Dan Eischen