Home • About Us • A-Z Index • Search * Contact Us • Register • Login • Press • Shop

The Open Brand -- Problem Reporting and Interpretations System

Problem Report 1667 Details

Help Show help | Quick Search | Submit a Test Suite Support Request | Click here to view your privileges

This page provides all information on Problem Report 1667.

Report 1667 Actions

    Problem Report Number 1667
    Submitter's Classification Minor System Fault
    State Resolved
    Resolution Rejected (REJ)
    Problem Resolution ID REJ.X.0471
    Raised 2000-03-22 08:00
    Updated 2003-03-13 08:00
    Published null
    Product Standard Internationalised Terminal Interfaces
    Certification Program The Open Brand certification program
    Test Suite VSU version 5.0.3
    Test Identification N/A/N/A N/A
    Problem Summary PG4U.00174 Request for clarification regarding whether a terminfo description written for xterm on an ASCII system must work the same if added to the terminfo database on an EBCDIC system
    Problem Text
    We wish to have your opinion regarding the functionality of tic. A customer
    recently wrote:

    Recently I downloaded a terminfo description for an "xterm-ncsa" from
    Linkname: BetterTelnet Terminfo Description
    URL: http://www.cstone.net/~rbraun/mac/telnet/terminfo.txt

    I compiled it with "tic". Worked fine on Solaris. At first, seemed
    to work equally well on OS/390. Colors and everything. Some more
    use showed that in vi the quotation mark behaved as a backspace.
    Ouch. After a little pondering, I examined the code and found:

    kbs=\177,

    I changed this to:

    kbs=^?,

    recompiled, and the problem vanished. Ouch. Is there a standard
    for representation of character codes in terminfo files? Should
    escape sequences always be presumed to represent ASCII characters,
    and the EBCDIC equivalent be substituted by tic? If not,
    terminfo source files aren't very portable.

    You may consider this to be Working As (mis-)Designed; I believe
    otherwise. When the supplier of a terminal provides a terminfo
    description, it can only be in the codes the terminal generates
    (generally ASCII); the supplier has no knowledge of what
    transformations any particular OS may apply to the command
    strings that terminal generates. For the terminfo description
    to be of any use, octal escape sequences must be interpreted
    with reference to the codes generated by the terminal, not
    those perceived in the operating environment.

    To make terminfo descriptions generally useful, one of the

    1) Re-specify "tic" so octal escape seqences are taken to be
    ASCII rather than EBCDIC.

    2) Provide a command line option for the user to specify the
    code page for interpreting octal escape sequences contained
    in the terminal description.

    3) Provide a conversion utility to transform terminal descriptions
    from any code page to any other.

    All these considerations apply equally to to the "infocmp" utility,
    wihch provides the complementary function to "tic".

    I guess the question we would like to pose to X/Open is: are we required by X/Open to
    support ASCII functionality in this case so that "tic" works in the way the customer wants?
    Currently, as the customer implies, because we are EBCDIC based tic is working as designed.
    Test Output
    N/A

    Review Information

    Review Type TSMA Review
    Start Date null
    Completed null
    Status Complete
    Review Recommendation No Resolution Given
    Review Response
    This confusion over code sets only arises because a terminal emulator is
    being used instead of an actual (hardware) device. Clearly, for a
    terminal device the issue of code sets does not arise - any characters
    specified using octal in a terminfo description must correspond to the
    actual character values used by the device.

    The XCurses specification states:

    X/Open-compliant implementations must provide a facility that accepts
    source files in the format specified in this chapter as a means of
    entering information into the terminfo database. The facility for
    installing this information into the database is implementation-
    specific. A valid terminfo entry describing a given model of terminal
    can be added to terminfo on any X/Open-compliant implementation to
    permit use of the same terminal model.

    Our view is that ASCII and EBCDIC variants of a given software terminal
    emulator do not constitute "the same terminal model", since they use
    different character values. Thus there is no requirement for a terminfo
    description written for an ASCII xterm to be usable with an EBCDIC xterm.

    This interpretation request asks for a Minor System Fault to be granted
    for the implementation. Since the information presented in the request
    does not appear to identify a fault in the implementation, it is
    recommended that the request is refused.

    Review Type SA Review
    Start Date null
    Completed null
    Status Complete
    Review Resolution Rejected (REJ)
    Review Conclusion
    This request is refused.

    Problem Reporting System Options:

     

    Back   

Contact the Certification Authority