How does TERM=dumb support work?

[Augie Fackler]

On Sep 25, 2012, at 6:42 AM, Carsten Mattner <carstenmattner at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

What you're seeing actually strikes me as a bug: this makes anything with a progress bar unusable in emacs shell-mode, for example. Is there a reason 9term doesn't export reasonable terminfo for its capabilities?