Couldn't we enable 256 colors by default on TERM?

[Pádraig Brady]

On 06/26/2012 03:56 AM, Chris Adams wrote:
> Once upon a time, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> said:
>> On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 08:47:16PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
>>> Trying to do this in profile scripts assumes that you only run local
>>> terminals that come from Fedora and that have been tested.  For example,
>>> if you SSH to a Fedora box from an old xterm that doesn't do 256 colors,
>>> what happens if profile automagically turns xterm into xterm-256color?
>>
>> The proposal actually handles that by parsing the output of the who 
>> command, but I'm not sure I'm morally in favour of that.
> 
> That wasn't there when I checked before my email, so I didn't know that.
> It sounds like adding one hack on top of another; trying to parse the
> output of a command not documented to have a fixed specific format is an
> even worse idea IMHO.

Fair enough.

The main caveat with per terminal settings is that
it might be desired to provide config options per terminal.
Though I suppose users can always override TERM in their
startup files in the unlikely case they need to change
back to 'xterm' for example.

Note the feature is not completed at all.
The presented /etc/profile.d/256colors.sh was only
a 2 minute hack that I thought was worth presenting
as it allows one to easily check the feature and
it does actually work in the vast majority of cases.

> I'm also always looking to avoid having more programs automatically run
> at the start of a login.  If you've ever had to deal with logging into
> an overloaded system, the last thing you want is a profile script doing
> "who" and "grep" just to try to override the TERM variable to make it
> prettier.  I'd like to see less of that, not more.

Agreed.

cheers,
Pádraig.