[Pkg-mc-devel] Bug#563625: Bug#563625: cursor disappears when visible-tabs are used in mc-edit

[Thomas Dickey]

On Tue, 5 Jan 2010, Drew Parsons wrote:

> On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 09:31 +0100, Yury V. Zaytsev wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 18:03 +1100, Drew Parsons wrote:
>>
>>> ... and so mc fails to run with the given workaround. There is no such
>>> gnome-256color terminfo.
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> Actually this workaround doesn't work at all, that's why I removed it
>> from the new version of the package to be uploaded soon. The real fix is
>> to patch VTE, which I did for my Ubuntu PPA and updated the bug against
>> upstream, but it's around for like 3 years already and they are not
>> really determined to fix it.
>>
>
> It's an extremely annoying situation.  Will the VTE patch be applied to
> Debian's version?
>
> On Mon, 2010-01-04 at 04:55 -0500, Thomas Dickey wrote:
>> gnome-256color isn't in ncurses-base, but is in ncurses-term.
>
> Ah ok, thanks Thomas.

no problem...

> I notice that ncurses-base does have xterm-256color, and it fixes 
(works
> around) the cursor problem the same way that gnome-256color from
> ncurses-term does.
>
> In fact xterm-256color is probably a little saner, since I notice if I
> use gnome-256color, that there's a side-effect where mc outputs "Press
> any key to continue..." and halts waiting for a key, when I run an
> aliased cd command to a specific directory.  Very annoying.

Something like that sounds more like something not finding the entry
(but on Debian, everyone should be looking in the same place).

It's not likely to be a terminfo difference, since that doesn't have much 
to do with the input-handling (unless there's some mismatch in 
function-keys, for instance).

> I suggest the best thing for us in the short term is to keep the advice
> in README.Debian, but refer to xterm-256color rather than
> gnome-256color.

hmm - see the output of "infocmp xterm-256color gnome-256color" to see why 
I think that's not a good recommendation: its function keys are very 
different from xterm's, which would only aggravate some longstanding bug 
reports.  There are other differences, to hide some of gnome-terminal's 
bugs.

> That would save having to pull in the extra ncurses package, and it
> works better anyway.  (or did you mean, Yury, that xterm-256color does
> not fix the problem in the new version either?)
>
> (maybe a better solution still would be to remove gnome-terminal from
> the archives altogether??? ;)  )

I don't suppose there's much hope of that.  It would be nice if VTE were
documented properly, but that may be even less likely.

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