Warren Young <war...@etr-usa.com> writes: > As for the portability of ANSI terminal escape codes, it’s still best to > delegate such things to curses or libraries like it, despite the near > ubiquity of ANSI-family terminal emulators.
Does anyone really use a non-ANSI terminal to run Automake test suites? I haven't seen one in probably twenty years. I'm sure they still exist in odd corners of some data center, but I'm quite dubious they would be running Automake-driven test suites, as opposed to being connected to some ancient mainframe that's as obscure as the terminal. I think this is pointless portability akin to testing whether the C library supports memcpy. I suppose in theory one could use tput to get the appropriate strings, but now you're trading a theoretical portability issue (a terminal type that's so esoteric as to not support basic ANSI escape codes) for a very real and practical portability issue (a system that doesn't have the curses/ncurses binaries installed). This doesn't seem like a benefit. (I'm in favor of disabling color by default, though, and having the default color enabled mode test whether stdout is a tty before adding colors. Those address the much more common case of redirecting test output to a file, where the ANSI codes cause a lot of problems.) -- Russ Allbery (ea...@eyrie.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
