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standards/47454: terminfo(5) does not have a capability for terminal/display character set
>Synopsis: terminfo(5) does not have a capability for terminal/display
>Arrival-Date: Tue Jan 15 21:20:01 +0000 2013
>Originator: Erik E. Fair
>Release: NetBSD 6.0_STABLE
The NetBSD Project
System: NetBSD cesium.clock.org 6.0_STABLE NetBSD 6.0_STABLE (V240) #4: Sat Dec
1 19:39:37 PST 2012
One key piece of information from the terminal display capabilities
of terminfo(5) is missing: a given terminal's character set.
Given UNIX's origins in the USA, we've had American Standard Code for
Information Interchange (ASCII, a.k.a. US-ASCII) as the system default
assumption since its creation, but now NetBSD (Unix's successor) is
being used in many countries with multiple character sets (e.g.
ISO-8859-1, ISO-2022-JP, KOI8-R, ISO-10646 (UTF-8)), and in
multi-lingual text processing applications where international
capability in the base system is required.
The POSIX locale LANG environment variable doesn't quite do it, and
can be in conflict with what the user's terminal can actually display,
whether that be an xterm(1) (or something that emulates it like MacOS
X's "Terminal" application), or wsdisplay(4). Programs that handle
multiple labelled character sets (e.g. less(1), Mail User Agents:
Mail, pine, elm, nmh, etc) and need to match or convert character sets
for display need this information to prevent violation of the
"Principle of Least Astonishment."
At minimum, anything that sets the TERM environment variable ought to
also set LANG as appropriate to the capabilities of the display.
<code/input/activities to reproduce the problem (multiple lines)>
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