OT: Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[Brian K. White]

Fairlight wrote:
> In the relative spacial/temporal region of
> Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 07:11:39AM -0400, Brian K. White achieved the
> spontaneous generation of the following:
>>
>> Oh please. reg files are plain text. It is expected that if you are
>> concerned, you simply look at it in a text editor. It's impossible
>> to hide any back doors in it.
>> In any event, this was exported from an XPhome machine and as such
>> will not import into your windows for workgroups 3.11.  :)
>
> It's win95b.  :)
>
> Technically, PuTTY settings should transplant.  They did between
> 95/98se. It's not like there's a PuTTY XP or somesuch.

The settings themselves are the same, but the path to them is different.

>>> The problem, more than likely, is in my termcap settings on the
>>> remote host, not my PuTTY settings.  I mean, SCO keys aside, it
>>> really only has one screen-drawing emulation mode.
>>
>> That's why the above settings cause putty to emulate the sco
>> console, rather than vt-any, or xterm. To avoid the need to install
>> or edit the hosts termcap & terminfo. It uses an entry that's
>> already always in the stock termcap & terminfo.
>
> That's -entirely- the backwards way of doing things, IMNSHO.  If it
> works
> for you, go for it.  I don't believe in munging an application to
> cater to lousy settings on a server.  And I've personally always
> considered SCO's scoansi flaky and unnecessary.  A prior ANSI
> standard existed for a reason.
> A proper termcap/terminfo creation (termcap only in the case of fP)
> to make
> a quirky system behave as most generic (ie., any terminal emulation
> package in the world, not just the 3 or 4 that support scoansi)
> emulator expects things to go is the correct way to do it, IMHO.
> YMMV.  IANAL.  And other cliched acronyms.  :)

If I connect to lots of machines, and they all happen to already have the
same stock termcap & terminfo, then by what backwards logic is it better to
have to hack every one of those boxes the first time I connect to them
before I get to do anything else, when I have at least half a dozen
_terminal emulators_ that already work flawlessly with the boxes as they
are?

I understand the original design philosophy behind termcap & terminfo
specifically to provide a means for the host to support any terminal, and
SCO's ansi is indeed a needless mutation of the perfectly good "ansi" that
already existed, but neither of those changes the fact that it's more
practical for my one pc to emulate all the sco boxes than for all the sco
boxes to cater to my pc.

Also a terminal emulator on a pc isn't a real terminal, it's software, it
doesn't have any "native" operation of it's own that is any more right than
any of it's other possible emulations. It's 100% emulation and no matter
what it does, its' emulating something, so emulating the sco console is no
different than any other way it could possibly work. Given that, there is no
validity to the argument that it's better to tell the host how to understand
the terminal than to tell the terminal how to understand the host.
Ultimately they are both "just software" in this case and both are mutable,
so it comes down to which way requires more work which my first paragraph
addresses.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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