How does TERM=dumb support work?

[Carsten Mattner]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Augie Fackler <raf at durin42.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 23, 2012, at 4:52 PM, Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> When I compare the progress bar functionality of a clone
>> operation in hg and git running this in 9term (plan9[port])
>> only hg manages to do something acceptable. I searched
>> the archives and found patches for S390 which look like
>> the motivation for this.
>>
>> I want to bring this up on the git mailing list but would like
>> to know beforehand what and how hg does manage to support
>> TERM=dumb without degrading too much. Knowing how
>> hg does it is useful to suggest or implement changes to git.
>
> What's the behavior you're seeing that's special around TERM=dumb? I'm unaware of anything other than disabling color, and grep isn't helping me out.

The progress extension doesn't break in 9term and I was wondering
what's different in there compared to git's progress bar and other
progress bar implementations in wget or other tools that make it
work properly in 9term.