Curses.Blinkenlights debugging

Kurt Granroth kurt.offlineimap at granroth.com
Sun Apr 11 02:52:53 UTC 2010


On 4/7/10 5:15 AM, John Goerzen wrote:
> Kurt Granroth wrote:
>> Can I take the lack of responses to mean that nobody else sees this?
>> Maybe nobody else uses OpenSUSE?
>
> I've never seen it. I might wonder, though, if it is particular to the
> terminal program or profile you're using. What happens, for instance, if
> you open a terminal on OpenSUSE and ssh to a Debian or Fedora system and
> run OfflineIMAP there? If you do the inverse? If you change $TERM?

It's definitely not related to the terminal, profile, or environment 
variables.  That leaves:

* some system setting
* version of offlineimap
* version of ncurses

I tested three systems: Fedora 12, Mac OS X, and OpenSUSE 11.2.

Test 1: Run offlineimap directly in OpenSUSE
Result: Can't see the status text at all.

Test 1: Login to OpenSUSE box from OS X
Result: In semi-transparent window, I can see that the status text is 
black... which explains why I can't see it with a (non-translucent) 
black background.

I switch through various profiles in Terminal.app, all with different 
foreground and background colors and with varying levels of 
translucency.  The end result was always the same: status text is black 
(same as background).

Test 2: Login to OpenSUSE box from Fedora 12
Result: Same as in OS X and directly on OpenSUSE; black (invisible) text

Test 3: Run offlineimap directly in Fedora 12
Result: Status text is *white* so it shows up in stark contrast to the 
black background.  Text is white regardless of the profile used.

Test 4: Login to Fedora from OS X
Result: Still shows up as white

Test 5: Login to Fedora from OpenSUSE
Result: Still shows up as white

THEREFORE, it's definitely specific to OpenSUSE and has nothing to do 
with the terminal (different one on all three test systems), profiles 
(many different color schemes throughout) and $TERM (varied between 
'xterm', 'screen', and 'xterm-color').

Maybe it's a version thing?

Fedora12:
offlineimap 6.1.2
ncurses 5.7

OpenSUSE:
offlineimap 6.0.3
ncurses 5.6

I guess I'll try upgrading offlineimap on an OpenSUSE box in the next 
few days.  I'd be curious to know, though, if anybody running on a 
non-OpenSUSE box (Ubuntu, maybe) has a similar version number pairing 
and isn't seeing the same problem.

Kurt




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