grumble about GNU info

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 04:23:53PM -0500, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:
> The alias on Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10 seems to be "ls --color=tty".
> Another undocumented setting.  Grunt.

ls --color=auto would have been much better.  Plain ls would have been
best. :)

> On Fedora 9, the colorization does not happen in the case that annoys
> me but it does on Ubuntu 8.10.  The case is inside my text editor: it
> provides a fake terminal, inside a window, for running shell commands.
> 
> The $TERM setting is "vanilla" on Fedora and "dumb" on Ubuntu (at one
> time these were reasonable).
> 
> On Fedora:
>     $ echo $TERM
>     vanilla
>     $ typeset -p TERM
>     declare -x TERM="vanilla"
>     $ infocmp -L
>     infocmp: couldn't open terminfo file /lib/terminfo/v/vanilla.
>     $ TERM=dumb infocmp -L
>     # Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /usr/share/terminfo/d/dumb
>     dumb|80-column dumb tty,
> 	    auto_right_margin,
> 	    columns#80,
> 	    bell=^G, carriage_return=^M, cursor_down=^J,
> 	    scroll_forward=^J,
>     $ 
> 
> 
> On Ubuntu, I get a result that surprises me.
> 
>     $ echo $TERM
>     dumb
>     $ typeset -p TERM
>     declare -- TERM="dumb"
>     $ infocmp -L
>     infocmp: environment variable TERM not set
>     $ TERM=dumb infocmp -L
>     #       Reconstructed via infocmp from file: /lib/terminfo/d/dumb
>     dumb|80-column dumb tty,
> 	    auto_right_margin,
> 	    columns#80,
> 	    bell=^G, carriage_return=^M, cursor_down=^J,
> 	    scroll_forward=^J,
>     $
> 
> How did TERM get set to be unexported?  From looking at an strace, it
> seems that JOVE has been compiled to not export TERM to the shell.  (I
> built JOVE for Fedora (for myself) but someone else builds it for Ubuntu.)
> 
> In any case, exporting TERM=dumb does not fix ls on Ubuntu.  Nor does
> making TERM "vanilla".
> 
> |     I've never tried pinfo, but info is a PITA!
> 
> pinfo is slightly less of a PITA.  Nothing can fix the crappy texinfo
> data, but the keystrokes are a little more familiar.  KDE's help
> system (whatever it is called) has a still better GUI.

Sounds like fun.

How attached are you to your editor choice? :)

-- 
Len Sorensen
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