bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[David Lazaro Saz]

Hi,

I've tried to find an answer to this question without success.

Why does bsdinstall(8) use ASCII characters for drawing lines instead of line 
drawing characters as the old sysinstall(8) did?

Thanks,

David

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Re: bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2013 05:23:22 +0100, David Lazaro Saz wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've tried to find an answer to this question without success.
> 
> Why does bsdinstall(8) use ASCII characters for drawing lines
> instead of line drawing characters as the old sysinstall(8) did?

I assume this has to do with a change which happened long time
ago. In the past, those characters could be used in text mode
(for example by the Midnight Commander) and even in combination
with LC settings like de_DE.ISO8859-1. Probably the character
sets in /usr/share/syscons/fonts don't support them anymore. I've
had success using the fonts directory content from a 4.x system
and "transition" it though various later versions, but today I
simply accept the inavailability. :-)

Because the line drawing characters in the Midnight Commander
don't work for me anymore, I use the -a option. Still when run
in an X terminal, they are properly displayed.

I think to avoid problems, the use of linedrawing characters
has been dropped.


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
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Re: bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[Devin Teske]

On Jan 19, 2013, at 8:23 PM, David Lazaro Saz wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I've tried to find an answer to this question without success.
> 
> Why does bsdinstall(8) use ASCII characters for drawing lines instead of line 
> drawing characters as the old sysinstall(8) did?
> 

A different theory…

It should be noted that sysinstall uses an older version of libdialog (which in 
9.x was moved to libodialog). Here's a side-by-side comparison of libodialog 
(left) and libdialog (right):

http://druidbsd.sf.net/download/bsdconfig/MediaCompareFTP.png

In that case, $TERM was "xterm-256color" running via Apple's Terminal.app.

Of interest I would think is the output of:

dialog --version
echo $TERM

and whether (if possible) sysinstall produces similar results (what release are 
you running?)
-- 
Devin

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Re: bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[David Lazaro Saz]

On Jan 20, 2013, at 2:50 PM, Devin Teske  wrote:

> Of interest I would think is the output of:
> 
> dialog --version
> echo $TERM
> 
> and whether (if possible) sysinstall produces similar results (what release 
> are you running?)

I'm still running 8.3 in production. I've noticed this while playing with 9.0 
and 9.1 both on vmware and older machines.

I think that you are right and it has to do with the TERM variable and how it 
is set in the system console. In 8.3, the system console is defined as "cons25" 
while on 9.1 it is defined as "xterm". If I execute the following command:

# TERM=cons25 bsdinstall

Then the line drawing characters are show correctly on the system console. If I 
do the opposite on 8.3, defining TERM as xterm, then the results are even worse 
than on 9.1.

dialog(1) is on version 1.1-20100428 on 9.1 and on version 0.3 on 8.3.

I can't find neither when nor why the system console was changed to xterm 
looking at the release notes of FreeBSD 9.0, but this seem to be the reason. 
The TERM variable is defined on /etc/ttys, so I'll try to find the change on 
the svn repository to shed some light.

Would you recommend opening a PR about this?

Thanks for your help.

David

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Re: bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[Thomas Dickey]

On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 04:03:31PM +0100, David Lazaro Saz wrote:
> 
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 2:50 PM, Devin Teske  wrote:
> 
> > Of interest I would think is the output of:
> > 
> > dialog --version
> > echo $TERM
> > 
> > and whether (if possible) sysinstall produces similar results (what release 
> > are you running?)
> 
> I'm still running 8.3 in production. I've noticed this while playing with 9.0 
> and 9.1 both on vmware and older machines.
> 
> I think that you are right and it has to do with the TERM variable and how it 
> is set in the system console. In 8.3, the system console is defined as 
> "cons25" while on 9.1 it is defined as "xterm". If I execute the following 
> command:
> 
> # TERM=cons25 bsdinstall
> 
> Then the line drawing characters are show correctly on the system console. If 
> I do the opposite on 8.3, defining TERM as xterm, then the results are even 
> worse than on 9.1.
> 
> dialog(1) is on version 1.1-20100428 on 9.1 and on version 0.3 on 8.3.
> 
> I can't find neither when nor why the system console was changed to xterm
> looking at the release notes of FreeBSD 9.0, but this seem to be the reason. 
> The TERM variable is defined on /etc/ttys, so I'll try to find the change on
> the svn repository to shed some light.

TERM is one thing, the driver is another.

Since the "xterm" terminal description supports line-drawing characters,
it sounds as if the underlying problem is in the console driver.

ncurses would use ASCII characters if it is told that the terminal
cannot use line-drawing characters.  However, it uses the VT100
line-drawing characters if possible.

Running vttest establishes that the issue is not in ncurses
(menu item 3, character sets).  That shows only ASCII characters.

-- 
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net


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Re: bsdinstall(8) line drawing characters

[David Lazaro Saz]

On Jan 20, 2013, at 7:46 PM, Thomas Dickey  wrote:

> TERM is one thing, the driver is another.
> 
> Since the "xterm" terminal description supports line-drawing characters, it 
> sounds as if the underlying problem is in the console driver.

You are right. The problem is in how teken(3) handles the special line drawing 
mode of xterm. When I changed the TERM variable to cons25, dialog(1) changed 
the way in which it draws the panels, using, it seems, direct code points for 
its graphics.

It seems that teken(3) once handled this by using the code points for CP437 but 
that it was reverted because there were problems with other languages. It is 
documented in PR kern/141633 at 
.

There seems to be support for using proper unicode code points for line drawing 
characters if Unicode support is enabled for teken(3).

If anybody else is curious, the code for line drawing escape sequences is in 
/sys/teken/teken_scs.h.

I would like to see this working by default. Who is the current maintainer of 
that code?

David

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