Bug#368916: gnome-terminal: $TERM should be set to gnome instead of xterm

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Hey.

On Mon, 2015-03-23 at 14:11 +0100, Egmont Koblinger wrote: 
> I firmly disagree with Christoph's comment "Apparently upstream
> intentionally breaks things or simply doesn't care."
Well at least it was changed (as it was said in some other discussion)
from properly announcing it as "vte" or something like that to some
wrong value... so one could interpret this as intention ;)
And that issues has been open for quite a while, with the fix being
trivial, so since I didn't really assume bad faith on the upstream side,
I concluded it must be lack of interest.


> We do care, and we worked hard recently to make gnome-terminal work
> reasonably close to xterm.  Just look at the changelog and count how
> many emulation fixes we had in the last 1.5 years!  Gnome-terminal has
> set TERM=xterm for a long time, and xterm is our reference as for how
> the terminal should work.
I never said you'd be doing bad work in creating a terminal itself or
making it close in behaviour to xterm, actually gnome-terminal/VTE is my
favourite terminal emulator.
But the idea of terminal names in terminfo is not that there is a common
base set which all have to try to implement as closely as possible - and
everything beyond that may just cause issues.
Actually that's one of the basic ideas of terminfo to make terminals
usable in an end-device independent manner.

As soon as xterm would change something, gnome-terminal would be out of
sync for at least a while, and this already assumes that "perfect"
compatibility can be reached.

And the other way round: Since some other terminal emulators choose to
announce themselves as "xterm" it also makes life of the real XTerm much
hard in that they probably must think twice before they could do a
change to their terminal definitions, knowing that this would break with
n other terminals.

As I've mentioned in the discussions, I didn't get the opinion that the
upstream of Xterm/ncruses/terminfo were particularly happy about that
situation - but maybe I just misunderstood them.


> On the other hand, TERM=gnome, which is written and maintained
> (probably not maintained actively too much) by xterm/terminfo's
> maintainer, is probably way out of date.
Hmm well that's another topic.
But at least for the few things I tried now, "gnome" seemed to have
produced better results.


> Without looking at the details, I'm quite sure that TERM=xterm is way
> closer to describe gnome-terminal's behavior than TERM=gnome.  And
> even if someone updates and corrects the "gnome" terminal description,
> we'd have to wait years until it's deployed to most of the hosts where
> you'd want to ssh to.
Well we had that very same discussion over at the GNOME bugzilla:
The problem you describe isn't really much different from when you or
anyone else use "xterm".
As soon as that changes it would also takes years to propagate.


> Sure it's not perfect, but incorrectly reporting blink support is
> probably a magnitudes smaller problem than the ones you'd face with
> TERM=gnome.
Just out of curiosity, which problems are known? I run with
"gnome-256color" for a while now and everything seems to run smoothly.


> *If* someone updates TERM=gnome and keeps it updated, changing to that
> as the default might become a viable option in maybe 5 years or so.
Not sure how the responsibilities are laid out there, but shouldn't the
upstream of each terminal emulator make sure to ship a proper definition
or at least keep it updated over at ncurses/terminfo?


Cheers,
Chris.
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