> [Summary for newly added recipients: after a recent round of upgrades, I
> found that typing meta-key combinations into xterm with bash as my shell
> resulted in non-ASCII characters rather than the expected escape sequences.
> Further analysis revealed that the trigger was an update to xterm's terminfo
> entry (from ncurses-base), which added definitions of smm and rmm despite
> the comment in http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=444250#40 .]
>
> Thomas Dickey <dic...@his.com> writes:
>
> > That's already been discussed in SuSE - it's an issue with bash.
> > It should allow the decision whether to enable meta mode to be
> > configurable. bash's maintainer hasn't been cooperative.
>
> As of bash 4.1 (and the corresponding readline 6.1 release), there is now an
> enable-meta-key readline variable that has the desired effect. Bash and
> readline have logic (_rl_init_eightbit) to set related variables
> (convert-meta, input-meta, and output-meta) sanely in eight-bit locales, but
> always leave enable-meta-key on by default; could you please patch
> _rl_init_eightbit to set _rl_enable_meta = 0 in eight-bit mode?
Why would I want to turn off _rl_enable_meta in eight-bit mode? It
seems that's when I should want it, since it's supposed to reflect the
terminal's indicating that any available meta key enables the sending
of eight-bit characters when it's used.
For this issue to exist, the terminal has to advertise (using "km")
that it has a meta key that turns on the eighth bit of characters the
terminal sends when it's used as a modifier, and the "smm" capability
has to exist to enable it. If those are both true, and the
enable-meta variable is set, which it is by default, bash sends the
"smm" string. If I'm in eight-bit mode, I want that to be on.
I sent a bunch of questions last year about how xterm advertises
capabilities using terminfo and how it reacts when it gets the
corresponding escape sequences; those were ignored. I'm still
waiting.
Remember that the only way bash or any application can get to the
xterm resources is through terminfo/termcap. If understanding the
interaction between the two requires some remedial instruction, fire
away.
Chet
--
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, ITS, CWRU c...@case.edu http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/
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