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From: Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: Problem/issue with TERMINFO file
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2024 17:45:07 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Message-ID: <20241203093857.631@kylheku.com>
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On 2024-12-03, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:
> I have a situation where I am ssh'ing from a Linux machine running a
> relatively new (Debian flavored) distro to another machine running an older
> version of the same distro.  The TERM on the ssh'ing machine is
> tmux-256color, so when it ssh's to the other machine, it picks up this
> value for TERM.  The problem is that that file doesn't exist on the older
> machine.  So, the result is that whenever I run a ncurses based program
> (the main two of interest here are "less" and "vi" (vim)), I get a warning
> message saying something like "WARNING: terminal is not fully capable" (or
> something like that...).  And, the screen display (particularly in less) is
> not quite right.

tmux-256color *must* be compatible (or at least largely compatible) with
other 256 color extensions to ANSI like xterm-256color, so try that.

Find whatever "256 color" thing the machine's termcap does understand.

Failing that, use TERM=ansi, and in the vanishingly improbable case that
doesn't work, TERM=vt100.

> So, I figure "No problem"; I'll just copy over the terminfo file from the
> new machine to the old machine.  So, I copy /usr/share/terminfo/t/tmux-256color
> to the same place on the old machine.  But then, the error message doesn't
> go away and the basic problem does not go away.  So, for some reason, it
> doesn't like the new file.  I know I've done this sort of thing in the past
> and it has worked, but for some reason, it isn't working here.

"terminfo" consists of binary data which is not standardized. There
are different implementations of it. See Terminfo page in Wikipedia etc.

-- 
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca