[LLVMdev] Let's not depend on terminfo / curses?

[Nico Weber]

Hi,

llvm recently switched to using terminfo for detecting if terminals support
escape codes. There's some discussion about this after the commit happened
here:

http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/llvm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20130805/183590.html

After the discussion, it looks like the approach was switched from
depending on curses on just terminfo. From what I gather (the changelog
didn't say), the motivation for this is that depending on curses is better
than printing escape codes in terminals that don't support them.

I think depending on curses is gross, and there haven't been many
complaints about clang printing escape codes during the years it has
existed so far. Other projectsget by with isatty() &&
!strcmp(getenv("TERM"), "dumb") too, for example git:

https://github.com/git/git/blob/21ff9151e811059f5576ca906c519ee5bb5b925e/color.c#L183


If folks think that bringing in the decades of cruft in curses is a good
idea, I'd ask that the --enable-curses=no --enable-terminfo=no path at
least keeps the old logic. Are there any objections to that?

(And since there are probably fewer shells on OS X, would anyone mind if
--enable-curses=no --enable-terminfo=no was the default on OS X? And since
even git can get away with it, maybe on Linux too?)

Thanks,
Nico
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/attachments/20130908/2c5bbfc5/attachment.html>