Serious (ha-ha) bug in 4.9-RELEASE

[Brian T. Schellenberger]

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.)

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:

 Revision 1.89.2.25 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs], Tue Apr 29 
12:01:57 2003 UTC (6 months ago) by schweikh
Branch: RELENG_4
Changes since 1.89.2.24: +239 -81 lines
Diff to previous 1.89.2.24 (colored) to branchpoint 1.89 (colored)

MFC: mostly xterm changes (no more need for xterm-color, which is now an
     alias for xterm); removal of some two character names.

PR:		bin/41143


The motiviation for the change was:

	FreeBSD doesn't ship a termcap that is compatible with the
	color Xterm shipped by XFree86, certainly not as of
	XFree86-4.2 (and probably not ever).







| Most of the programs in /usr/games are old and hasn't been updated in a
| long while, so it isn't exactly surprising that things break eventually
| as the rest of the system changes.
| (The termcap code in /usr/games/hack doesn't seem to have been changed
| since it was first imported back in 1994.)

-- 
Brian, the man from Babble-On . . . .   bts at babbleon.org (personal)