Suggestion for terminal package maintainers

Corinna Vinschen corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com
Tue Jun 2 14:09:00 GMT 2009


On Jun  2 09:39, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 6/2/2009 9:28 AM, Ken Brown wrote:
>> On 6/2/2009 8:48 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> On Jun  1 17:03, Ken Brown wrote:
>>>> The Cygwin console, after some changes made this past weekend, now  
>>>> uses  ^? as the default erase character, and this is what is sent 
>>>> by the  backspace key instead of ^H   
>>>> [...]
>>>
>>> What makes me a bit concerned about this change is that, while we can
>>> change Cygwin's terminfo and termcap files, we can't do that for
>>> existing non-Cygwin installations.  Is it really safe to change the BS
>>> key to ^? now that the "cygwin" terminal type is known to return ^H for
>>> so many years?
>>
>> Applications like emacs that use ncurses should have no problem.  Are  
>> there applications that rely on the historical behavior of the cygwin  
>> terminal type rather than querying terminfo?  Apart from cygwin, such  
>> applications would have problems with any terminal type that decides to 
>> change its behavior.
>
> Sorry, I think I misinterpreted what you meant by "non-Cygwin  
> installations".  But wouldn't the issue be resolved by pushing the  
> change to the cygwin terminal type in terminfo upstream?

It would solve it over time when non-Cygwin systems pick up the
latest terminfo/termcap.  I'm just wondering if it's not a bit
surprising for remote apps when started in a Cygwin console window
via ssh/rsh/telnet/etc.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat



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