[screen-devel] [bug #52667] Off-by-one in RGB truecolor escape sequence parameter indices

[Egmont Koblinger]

Follow-up Comment #2, bug #52667 (project screen):

The problem is: in practice, everyone seems to be using the semicolon format
(without color space id). Removing support for this would break the look of
currently existing truecolor apps until one day they switch to the correct
colon separated (+ color space id) format. Which requires all the terminal
emulators to catch up first, then wait for a couple of years so that most
users have a new enough terminal emulator.

I'd love to see the whole world fixing it, but if it happens eventually at all
(which I cannot guarantee) then it'll take years. And while it's great to have
players who "push" the world towards the fix (by starting to reject the old
format early on), I'm afraid it might be too early to start that and would
cause some users turning away from using screen and/or truecolors.

In case of screen, of course it's two different questions in one: Which
formats does it accept as input from apps, and which format does it use
towards the host terminal emulator? My proposal: For now, it should accept at
least two formats (the popular and the correct one) as input, and emit the
popular one towards the host emulator (or have a config option, defaulting to
this). Seeing how terminal emulators catch up with the fix, in a couple of
years the sequences sent to the host emulator might be flipped to the correct
one, and probably not right then but yet another couple of years later support
for the old (currently popular) mode could be dropped.

It might also happen that there's not enough motivation in the terminal
emulator world to fix it, and we get stuck with the currently frequently used
semicolon format forever, I cannot foresee it.

    _______________________________________________________

Reply to this item at:

  <http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?52667>

_______________________________________________
  Message sent via/by Savannah
  http://savannah.gnu.org/