[Grml-devel] Discussion: Add ncurses-term to GRMLBASE or only GRML_FULL

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 02:29:43PM +0100, Markus bionix Ulrich wrote:
> we have the bts issue 1220 [1] and mika said to the topic, that maybe
> it's better to add the package ncurses-term to GRMLBASE instead to
> GRML_FULL.
[...]
> What is your opinion to the topic?

My first thought was "Oh, yes, sure! I explicitly install that on all
my boxes, too." But when I thought about why I install it on all my
boxes, I noticed that this may be suboptimal for a live CD:

screen has some interesting behaviour depending on where ncurses-terms
is installed or not. See
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=694178#10 for the
details.

Summary: If screen is started on the e.g. console (TERM=linux) of a
box with ncurses-terms installed (contains definitions for
screen.linux), it will notice the availability of screen.$TERM
definitions and use them. It just uses "screen" otherwise.

If you then SSH from inside the screen to another box where
ncurses-term isn't installed, the remote box won't know about the used
$TERM (screen.linux) and will argue about it.

So you can't run into that issue at all if ncurses-terms is not
installed on the machine where you start SSH inside a screen session.

In that light, I'm not sure if that would add more value than it would
cause issues.

		Kind regards, Axel
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