[Bug 1297051] Re: gnome-terminal doesn't recognise C1 controls

Egmont Koblinger egmont at gmail.com
Tue Sep 9 21:20:42 UTC 2014


The response to \e[>c should contain the version number.  Well, in case
of xterm it contains that.  Now, some emulators (e.g. vte) put their own
version number there, while some others (e.g. konsole) put the version
of xterm it claims to be compatible with.

Imagine there'd be a brand new escape sequence, to which the response
should (according to the specification) be the name of the terminal
emulator and the version number (e.g. "xterm-310", "konsole-2.14" etc.).
And some pieces of software begin to depend on this (if no software
depended on this then what would be the point?).

Now a new terminal emulator (let's call it "asdf") comes along and
figures out that certain apps just don't work there because they're
aware of xterm and konsole, but not of asdf. So they decide for
practical reasons to go against the standard and report "xterm-310"
instead of "asdf-0.1" because they're compatible with xterm-310 (who
knows, maybe even with newer releases, maybe not), and they want that
certain app to work. But "asdf-0.2" also adds a cool new feature that
xterm doesn't have. What to do then, how to advertise it? Shall they
report "xterm-310 (er, no, wait, actually asdf-0.2)"? Where will this
end?

Could this be made any simpler than the complete nightmare with browser
User-Agent strings? Is it worth starting at all?

I don't know and I'm not the one to make a decision. If xterm comes up
with something that looks promising, I'll port that to gnome-terminal.
That's all I can do, apart for speaking up against solutions that I
don't see viable.

Given that so far you're the only one I'm aware requesting this feature,
I'd say that the simplest is if you solve it your way for yourself, by
patching vte, or relying on the version number being 3600-ish, and try
to solve your problem without relying on answerback -  plenty of other
people managed to do this.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1297051

Title:
  gnome-terminal doesn't recognise C1 controls

Status in “vte3” package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  gnome-terminal seems not to recognise the C1 control characters.

  The particular character that is a problem for me is CSI. However
  there may be a generic issue with non-support of this whole range of
  characters.

  This range of characters should only be recognised when the encoding
  is a character set that is defined to include the C1 control
  characters but, at a quick look, that is all of the ISO-8859-x
  character sets and Unicode. (C1 control characters require encoding as
  a 2 byte sequence when the encoding is UTF-8. As unlikely as this may
  be to occur in practice, UTF-8 is not inconsistent with C1 control
  characters.)

  Part of the motivation for raising this bug report is that PuTTY seems
  to have declined in reliability recently and so I looked at why I am
  using PuTTY as opposed to gnome-terminal. Correct support of C1
  control characters is one reason. This works in PuTTY. It does not
  appear to work in gnome-terminal. Perhaps resources would be better
  spent making gnome-terminal work as well as PuTTY does, rather than
  attempting to get PuTTY fixed.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
  Package: gnome-terminal 3.6.1-0ubuntu6
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-18.32-generic 3.11.10.4
  Uname: Linux 3.11.0-18-generic x86_64
  NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
  ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2.2
  Architecture: amd64
  Date: Tue Mar 25 11:08:00 2014
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2011-10-25 (881 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
  MarkForUpload: True
  SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
  UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-11-08 (136 days ago)

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