How does TERM=dumb support work?

[Carsten Mattner]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 7:35 PM, Matt Mackall <mpm at selenic.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-09-25 at 18:08 +0200, Carsten Mattner wrote:
>> > there a reason 9term doesn't export reasonable terminfo for its capabilities?
>>
>> 9term is not a terminal "emulator" and therefore doesn't emulate
>> old terminals
>
> Nonsense. A "terminal" was a dedicated machine, with its own screen and
> keyboard, whereas a "terminal emulator" like xterm or 9term is simply an
> application giving the appearance of such a terminal in a window
> system.

And emulating more or less of these machines which made me
simplify and say "it's not an emulator" because AFAIK 9term
didn't set out to support vt2xx/v1xx/etc but write something
that does what they needed which is not necessarily what
your usual curses applications requires via that abstraction.

> 9term just happens to emulate the simplest of terminals, namely a
> typical early 1970s-era dumb terminal, which itself emulated a 1960s-era
> teletype printer (aka TTY) with no cursor addressing beyond what's
> present in ASCII (CR, LF, BS, tab) so terminfo and curses are
> irrelevant. On top of that, they've added UTF-8 support and mouse
> cut-and-paste. 9term actually does handle one escape sequence though: it
> copied xterm's title-setting code.

My answer was too simple and I thank you for your detailed answer.
What I didn't say and wanted to express is that it's not an emulator
as we know it which to me means like xterm emulating all kinds of
stuff you wouldn't miss when running editors and term multiplexers
and usual stuff. It's interesting that http://hg.suckless.org/st tries to
be minimal as it can but still has a a handful of sequences it may
want to support for the convenience of using usual terminal applications.
I haven't read Raster's Terminology in detail but from a quick glance
it seems to be from scratch and almost works flawlessly in day to day
use (svn co http://svn.enlightenment.org/svn/e/trunk/terminology).