DEL is a control character that should be (essentially) ignored when written to a screen. This was the case for xterm until 2002 Dec 8 when T. Dickey changed the XFree86 version. This was a mistake, as evidenced by the fact that he has changed it back (at my prompting) recently (since the fork). The correct fix is to change the initialization of VTPrsTbl.c's ansi_table[0x7f] from CASE_PRINT to CASE_IGNORE. All the other tables defined in this file seem to have CASE_IGNORE for DEL. This change was independently derived by me.
test case: In a bash shell, running in the xterm to be tested, run echo -e 'X\177Y' This should display XY without any glyph or space between them.
It is fixed upstream I think, in xterm patch #188: Patch #188 - 2004/5/12 - XFree86 4.4.99.6 * correct table entry for DEL in the ground state, which marked it as a printable character from patch #171 (report by D Hugh Redelmeier). (quote from Thomas E. Dickey site: http://dickey.his.com/xterm/xterm.log.html) Maybe would be a good ideea to update to latest xterm version (Patch #194 - 2004/7/27) for the upcoming release ..
I'm marking this bug as blocking the next release, hopeing someone will look into it before the code freeze ... I know there are more important problems than this one, but I didn't knew other way to attract attention to it .. If you disagrea please undo my changes .. The last version of xterm (#195) can be get from Thomas E. Dickey website: <http://dickey.his.com/xterm/>
Thomas suggests we go with Xterm version 195 for our release. Can anyone manage to get this integrated?
I'll look into this.
So, a quick look at the xterm-195 gives 17000 lines of diff between the in-tree xterm and xterm-195. 5000 or so is in configure, but the rest is actual code changes. Do we want to merge this at this point?
Keith Packard said that he talked with Thomas E. Dickey recently and would ask him if we could/should import his upstream work. Keith, have you had a chance to talk with him again?
Given that Thomas is the defacto xterm maintainer at this point, I suggest we just go with his current version (#195) which he indicated would suffice for our release. I believe most distributions package that separately in any case, making our inclusion somewhat redundant in any case.
I just merged in the 195 xterm release. Yes, this is probably redundant, but hopefully this will be the last release were we have to do this. Closing bug, the new xterm passes the testcase in comment #2.
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