Hi all,
Up until last week, we had been running emacs-19.34 on all of our
public hosts. The machines are all alphastations of various types
(500/500, 500/400, 255/300, and 255/233), and are all running Digital
Unix 4.0B. Some of the machines are public workstations, and others
are servers which our users can access via either telnet or ssh.
Last week, I installed emacs-20.2 on these machines. Both versions
of emacs compiled cleanly; make issued no errors. I did not have edit
any of the source to compile the packages. Both versions were built
using the same configure options -- none. While version 20.2 seemed to
work perfectly on my desktop machine (alphastation 255/233, dUnix
4.0B) for 6 weeks prior to the public installation, we were inundated
by user complaints shortly after we made the change. In response, I've
created a symlink in /usr/local/bin between emacs and emacs-19.34. I
haven't been able to rectify (or even trace the origin of) the problem
I will describe below.
If a user accesses a remote host using either telnet or ssh, and if the
user's TERM environment variable is not set to `xterm,' (I've done most of
my testing with TERM set to `vt100'), emacs-20.2 does not update the
display properly. Issuing `C-l' usually rectifies the situation, but that
is not entirely consistent either. Sometimes, one must invoke `C-l' a
number of times. The symptoms observed depend on the value of TERM, but
are reproducible for each TERM type. For a vt100, the right arrow key
seems to delete text, as does inserting characters into previously entered
text. The reason I never observed the problem when I was running version
20.2 on my desktop workstation is that my TERM variable is set to `xterm.'
If I set TERM to `vt100' on my workstation, my local version of emacs-20.2
does not exhibit the display update problems. These are manifest only if I
ssh or telnet into another host. I should also add that most of our users
who complained of display problems are not accessing the remote host from
another unix machine. Generally these users are on PCs or Macs, and are
using one of the following terminal emulation packages: BetterTelnet,
Nifty Telnet, CRT, ewan, f-secure ssh, or the default Win95 telnet. I've
done testing with a number or these packages as well, and they exhibit
behavior identical to the behavior I observed on my desktop machine.
Has anyone noted similar behavior on their systems? I collected up
termscript files, and sent these and our termcap file off to the emacs
bugs list. Still, it would be useful to determine if these problems are
site specific, or if others have observed the same problems on their
dUnix4.0B systems.
Thanks!
Debra Alpert
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Unix Systems Group
Harvard University
Received on Mon Feb 23 1998 - 20:43:34 NZDT