[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#825054: bug in mutt or a library

Adam Borowski kilobyte at angband.pl
Mon May 23 10:47:37 UTC 2016


> My terminal colour configuration is black on white.
> After using mutt, the terminal colours are changed to grey on
> black. Workaround: type "reset" afterwards.
> Btw. neither xterm nor gnome-terminal mess with the colours, so
> I suspect, that the error is in xfce4-terminal, not mutt.
> This behaviour was not present in wheezy.

This applies to all vte-based terminals (lxterminal, etc).

As for the behaviour change, it is in mutt or one of libraries it uses, not
in xfce4-terminal or vte.  Let's, from an unstable system (including the
terminal) log in to a jessie server, and compare.  With stable mutt, you get
default fg on default bg, with unstable mutt, grey on black.

So let's diff the output:

 \e[43d                   # go to column 1 line 43 (1-based)
 Mailbox is unchanged.\n  # write a string
 \e[39;49m                # fg=default, bg=default
+\e[37m                   # fg=grey
+\e[40m                   # bg=black
 \r                       # go to column 1
 \e[K                     # clear line to the right
 \e[43;1H                 # go to column 1 line 43 (redundant...)
 \e[?1049l                # restore cursor position, switch to primary screen
 \r                       # go to column 1
 \e[?1l                   # switch grey arrow keys to "normal" mode
 \e>                      # switch keypad arrow keys to "normal" mode
 Mailbox is unchanged.\n  # write a string

As you can see, new mutt explicitely sets the colors to grey/black
immediately after setting them to default/default.  This is the cause of the
bug you see.

And why xterm and gnome-terminal don't exhibit it?  It's because of \e[?1049l
which is an xterm extension.  Many terminals don't implement it in the first
place -- this results in mutt not restoring the screen, which is okay, and
even if they do, the documentation is really unclear.  Thomas Dickey's
ctlseqs.txt refers to DECRC, which says just "Restore Cursor".  If you look
elsewhere for guidance, you'll usually find "restore cursor position".
I'd say the correct thing is to follow granddaddy vt100 which restored
colors/boldness/etc as well, but it'd undebatable that confusion exists.

But let's assume that xterm's interpretation is correct, and we immediately
change all terminals in Debian unstable to restore colors on DECRC.  The
problem is, a good part, perhaps even majority, of mutt users don't execute
it locally but ssh to a mail server elsewhere.  Thus, very often the
terminal will run Debian stable or oldstable, some derivative (like, say,
maemo which is EOL thus won't ever change this), some other distribution or
even a completely non-Linux OS whose terminals we don't have any control on.

Thus, let's ponder the purpose of mutt's change: it forces grey-on-black
just to immediately restore it.  That's utterly pointless, regardless of
whether the restore is expected to work or not.

My conclusion: whoever we blame, this bug is 100% a mutt regression, and
needs to be fixed there (or in a library mutt uses).


Meow!
-- 
An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy.



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