From: cgf AT cygnus DOT com (Christopher Faylor)
Subject: TERM/termcap question
14 Nov 1998 19:47:11 -0800
Message-ID: <19981114224052.A27081.cygnus.cygwin32.developers@cygnus.com>
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To: cygwin32-developers AT cygnus DOT com

I have checked in a change to cygwin that I think will cut down on a lot
of mailing list confusion but I wanted to check here before it sees the
light of day on B20.1.

I've made the dll default to setting TERM=cygwin if there is no TERM
environment variable already.  I also have a version of the termcap
library which should be released with B20.1 that will return the termcap
settings for cygwin (aka linux) if the TERM variable is set to cygwin
and no /etc/termcap was found.  The settings are the same as what is now
found in the released termcap data file except that I've added a cygwin
alias to the linux entry.

This means that we won't have to tell people to create or mount
a /etc directory and to make sure that termcap is in it.

I couldn't bring myself to have a product called "cygwin" use a default
TERM setting of "linux".  Am I wrong here?  It will still be possible
for a person to set TERM=linux if they prefer and it will still work.

I've brought the issue of using a "cygwin" setting in /etc/termcap up
before and Sergey pointed out that people will be much more likely to
already have a "linux" setting on systems that they login to.  Does that
mean we may be trading questions of "Why is it that when I run less I
get an error about the terminal not being functional?  for questions of
"Why is it that when I use Sergey's telnet to login to another system
and use less I get an error about the terminal not being functional?"

So the question is what should the default TERM setting be?  Should it
be cygwin, linux, vt100, or...?  Incidentally, the cygwin terminal
setting is not strictly the same as a linux console because it also
allows xterm escapes for setting the console title.  So, I guess that
another option for the terminal name is "xterm".

-- 
cgf AT cygnus DOT com
http://www.cygnus.com/