[Bug 2076112] [NEW] Move Truecolor entries such as xterm-direct to ncurses-base

[Filipe Brandenburger]

Public bug reported:

Also reported to Debian at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077993

Please consider moving at least some of the Truecolor terminfo entries,
such as xterm-direct, xterm-direct256, tmux-direct, etc. from the
optional ncurses-term package to the ncurses-base package.

The current state of the art for Truecolor terminals is setting
TERM=xterm-256color and COLORTERM=truecolor (or COLORTERM=24bit) but
there are quite a few issues with this approach, such as COLORTERM not
being preserved across ssh or sudo, not to mention this is a misue of
the xterm-256color terminfo entry.

It would be great to be able to use TERM=xterm-direct or TERM=xterm-
direct256 instead, but that requires the terminfo entry to be available
mostly everywhere and unfortunately that's not the case yet. The TERM
environment variable doesn't have a graceful fallback mechanism, so in
order to be able to set it correctly we first really need to make sure
the entries are really available everywhere.

This is an effort to try to make those entries more pervasive so that
they're actually viable as $TERM settings.

To some extent we can get by with installing ncurses-term everywhere,
but since the main point of that package is to include additional rare
odd non-standard terminfo entries and we're hoping to make these the new
default at some point (as most terminal emulators support Truecolor
these days) it would be great to include it into the default.

It would be great if this could be backported to the most recent LTS
version of Ubuntu, but at least getting it into new releases would
ensure at some point it would get into the next LTS and as that gets
deployed the entries would become as pervasive as possible.

** Affects: ncurses (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2076112

Title:
  Move Truecolor entries such as xterm-direct to ncurses-base

Status in ncurses package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Also reported to Debian at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
  bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1077993

  Please consider moving at least some of the Truecolor terminfo
  entries, such as xterm-direct, xterm-direct256, tmux-direct, etc. from
  the optional ncurses-term package to the ncurses-base package.

  The current state of the art for Truecolor terminals is setting
  TERM=xterm-256color and COLORTERM=truecolor (or COLORTERM=24bit) but
  there are quite a few issues with this approach, such as COLORTERM not
  being preserved across ssh or sudo, not to mention this is a misue of
  the xterm-256color terminfo entry.

  It would be great to be able to use TERM=xterm-direct or TERM=xterm-
  direct256 instead, but that requires the terminfo entry to be
  available mostly everywhere and unfortunately that's not the case yet.
  The TERM environment variable doesn't have a graceful fallback
  mechanism, so in order to be able to set it correctly we first really
  need to make sure the entries are really available everywhere.

  This is an effort to try to make those entries more pervasive so that
  they're actually viable as $TERM settings.

  To some extent we can get by with installing ncurses-term everywhere,
  but since the main point of that package is to include additional rare
  odd non-standard terminfo entries and we're hoping to make these the
  new default at some point (as most terminal emulators support
  Truecolor these days) it would be great to include it into the
  default.

  It would be great if this could be backported to the most recent LTS
  version of Ubuntu, but at least getting it into new releases would
  ensure at some point it would get into the next LTS and as that gets
  deployed the entries would become as pervasive as possible.

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