Bug#369867: gnome-terminal: does not emulate correctly legacy dec vt terminals ( escape sequences problem ? )

[Thomas Dickey]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 11:50:14PM +0200, Emmanuel Kasper wrote:
> Package: gnome-terminal
> Version: 2.8.2-2
> Severity: normal
> 
> 
> Hello
> When connecting to a OpenVMS box that expects the terminal to be a dec
> vt terminal, the display is garbaged on gnome-terminal. On Konsole and
> xterm, the display is fine. Maybe this is because gnome-terminal does
> not implement some rarely used escape sequences of the dec vt 100
> family. This bug is easily reproductible.

among other defects of gnome-terminal, it identifies itself as a "vt200"
(e.g., vt220), but does not actually emulate that series. 
gnome-terminal implements less than an 80% subset of vt100, with perhaps
30% of the vt200-specific sequences (being very generous here).  It
would be nice if gnome-terminal's developers finished the vt100
emulation.  kde's developers otoh have about 90% of vt100 done.

Apparently none of the gnome developers bother to do any research
regarding the various terminal types, supposing that if they're reading
xterm's code and cut/paste chunks to massage into gnome-style code
that's good enough.  (I'm amused when I read some of the cut/paste
sections - sometimes - not when following up on a bug report, since a
number of those feed into misguided requests for changes to xterm or
ncurses).  But the comment about "rarely used" indicates some lack of
insight into the fundamental problem, and deserved comment.

setting term to vt100...

Looking at gnome-terminal attempting to deal with the notes program,
it's apparent that it's simply not parsing control sequences properly -
something it's failed at on every version of gnome-terminal that I've
seen.  That's part of the 20% of vt100 functionality that I referred to
above.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net
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