Re: Problem/issue with TERMINFO file

On 2024-12-03, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:

I have a situation where I am ssh'ing from a Linux machine running a
relatively new (Debian flavored) distro to another machine running an older
version of the same distro.  The TERM on the ssh'ing machine is
tmux-256color, so when it ssh's to the other machine, it picks up this
value for TERM.  The problem is that that file doesn't exist on the older
machine.  So, the result is that whenever I run a ncurses based program
(the main two of interest here are "less" and "vi" (vim)), I get a warning
message saying something like "WARNING: terminal is not fully capable" (or
something like that...).  And, the screen display (particularly in less) is
not quite right.

tmux-256color *must* be compatible (or at least largely compatible) with
other 256 color extensions to ANSI like xterm-256color, so try that.

Find whatever "256 color" thing the machine's termcap does understand.

Failing that, use TERM=ansi, and in the vanishingly improbable case that
doesn't work, TERM=vt100.

So, I figure "No problem"; I'll just copy over the terminfo file from the
new machine to the old machine.  So, I copy /usr/share/terminfo/t/tmux-256color
to the same place on the old machine.  But then, the error message doesn't
go away and the basic problem does not go away.  So, for some reason, it
doesn't like the new file.  I know I've done this sort of thing in the past
and it has worked, but for some reason, it isn't working here.

"terminfo" consists of binary data which is not standardized. There
are different implementations of it. See Terminfo page in Wikipedia etc.

--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
Cygnal: Cygwin Native Application Library: http://kylheku.com/cygnal
Mastodon: @Kazinator@mstdn.ca