On Sun, Mar 01, 2015 at 01:32:01PM +0000, Pádraig Brady wrote: > On 27/02/15 13:48, Karel Zak wrote: > > This is not implemented yet, I (or any volunteer?) will try to add to code > > an extra layer to avoid the hardcoded sequences and read the colors from terminfo. > > I'd be careful to not over engineer that. > coreutils currently hardcodes ansi sequences, > and I've not heard specific complaints about it. > What terminals are not catered for here? At this point, it's hard to imagine anyone writing a new terminal emulator with incompatible color escape sequences. Anyone on really rare hardware terminals or crufty software that is different for some reason can always disable colors for software that hard-codes sequences. They're nice but non-essential. The only scenario I'm coming up with where it would be really good to use a library to find what escape sequences to use would be future-proofing against the day when somebody extends the ANSI color escape sequences to support more colors, or 3D for stereoscopic-vision terminals. And even then, only if for some reason they choose to extend the escape sequences in a non-backwards-compat way. I'd hold off on spending time on this until some new idea for color escape codes comes along. I think there's enough inertia behind the current ANSI escape sequences that terminal emulators will need to support current-style escape sequences for decades after the appearance of a new way of doing things. I think decades is long enough for util-linux to make this proposed change and have it percolate into long-term-support releases before any terminal emulators think they can get away with dropping support for current-style color escape sequences. Anyway, that's my 2 cents. I'd maybe change my mind if anyone has a real-life case where the hardcoded ANSI codes don't work for them, on a terminal they actually want to use, but terminfo would. (I'm not talking about ancient cruft you can find that's incompat, but rather stuff people actually do use regularly.) -- #define X(x,y) x##y Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cor , des.ca) "The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours! Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BC -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
