At Sat, 21 Feb 2009 22:46:58 -0500, Thor Lancelot Simon wrote:
Subject: Re: Making the keyboard work
>
> This was in fact my proposal -- though actually I would like to see
> login (possibly via login.conf) set $TERMCAP from $TERM if $TERM is
> set when login runs. The problem is that our ssh client doesn't
> forward $TERMCAP by default, just $TERM (and $ROWS and $COLUMNS, which
> is why xterm users don't notice other systems' busted xterm termcaps
> too often). But we could fix that easily enough.
ssh.com only forwards $TERM and uses the forwarded value as well, though
it too could be fixed relatively easily, however....
> I don't know what remote systems' sshds are likely to with $TERMCAP;
> and I'm not certain sysv-curses systems like Solaris will do anything
> with $TERMCAP even if they receive it; I don't have one handy to test.
> Meanwhile, we don't have a source of terminfo entries to feed into
> $TERMINFO.
I don't know if it's different now in modern systems using Terminfo, but
in older systems $TERMINFO could only be a pathname to a (compiled)
terminfo(5) file. Mostly this was probably because of the restricted
size of the process environment variables on older systems.
Ultimately I think it's still the user's responsibility to get the
appropriate TERMCAP/Terminfo definition onto the target host(s) in a
secure fashion, and then the existing "convenience" hooks in tools like
SSH will set the right hints about the name of the terminal type via
$TERM.
--
Greg A. Woods
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