On Oct 25, 2017, at 6:03 PM, Russ Allbery <ea...@eyrie.org> wrote:
>
> Warren Young <war...@etr-usa.com> writes:
>
>> As for the portability of ANSI terminal escape codes, it’s still best to
>> delegate such things to curses or libraries like it, despite the near
>> ubiquity of ANSI-family terminal emulators.
>
> Does anyone really use a non-ANSI terminal to run Automake test suites?
I’ve never even used the Automake test suite features, but I do currently have
a Raspberry Pi connected to a VT220 clone as the serial console:
https://tangentsoft.com/pidp8i/wiki?name=Warren%27s+PiDP-8/I+System
I’ve run programs through it that have not done the right thing despite my TERM
being set appropriately, suggesting they’ve got ANSI X3.64 — or more likely,
xterm-color[256] — expectations hard-coded into them.
Also, I gave the “TERM=dumb ./myprogram” example in a later reply.
Although DEC’s VT series, TERM=linux, xterm[-color[256]], and more are all
loosely related, the Venn diagram for it would probably be pretty messy.
This thread is about color. My Link MC3+ doesn’t even *have* color, but it
will do bold, underline, and blink. Why should Autoconf care what my terminal
can do? The operating system has a database mapping what my terminal can do to
a common API. Let the library handle it.
