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Terminal width lookup fails unnecessarily if terminfo unpopulated #2332

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Terminal width lookup fails unnecessarily if terminfo unpopulated#2332
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A-BUGSomething wrong, confusing or sub-standard in the software, docs, or user experience.cliCommand line parsing, options, arguments and suchlike.

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@hseg
hseg
opened on Feb 23, 2025

(Note: Very niche reproducer)

As noted in https://github.com/simonmichael/hledger/blob/master/hledger/Hledger/Cli/CliOptions.hs#L626, ifthe terminfo entry for $TERM can't be read, setupTermFromEnv throws an error. In particular, I'm encountering this when building hledger in a clean chroot that contains all its build dependencies, but doesn't contain the terminfo definitions for the terminal (kitty) I'm running the chrooted build in.

I'm a little loath to add kitty to the chroot unnecessarily, especially in view of the fact that hledger doesn't actually need an entire terminfo entry, just enough to tell the number of columns in the terminal. Given that the tests also pass with TERM=dumb, I'm guessing that its fallback settings are widely supported enough to work as an alternative.

Hence, I'd either recommend replacing the call to setupTermFromEnv with

setupTermFromEnv `catch` \(_ :: SetupTermError) -> setupTerm "dumb"

or document this dependency on TERM being valid somewhere (perhaps this ticket suffices).

For my part, I'm adding TERM="dumb" to my packaging script until this is fixed (much like I'd set LANG=C to reset to a known-good situation).

Activity

  1. simonmichael commented on Feb 25, 2025

    @simonmichael
    simonmichael
    on Feb 25, 2025
    Member

    Thanks for the report and suggestion. Is it something you could try to implement, @hseg ?

  2. simonmichael
    added
    A-BUGSomething wrong, confusing or sub-standard in the software, docs, or user experience.
    cliCommand line parsing, options, arguments and suchlike.
    on Feb 25, 2025
  3. hseg
    added a commit that references this issue on Feb 27, 2025

    fix: Use POSIX API to compute tty width (hledgerorg#2332)

    c45896e
  4. simonmichael
    added 2 commits that reference this issue on Feb 27, 2025

    fix: Use POSIX API to compute tty width (#2332)

    eef2987

    fix: Use POSIX API to compute tty width (#2332)

    a24c39f

  5. simonmichael commented on Feb 28, 2025

    @simonmichael
    simonmichael
    on Feb 28, 2025
    Member

    Now fixed thanks to #2340 I believe ?

  6. hseg commented on Feb 28, 2025

    @hseg
    hseg
    on Feb 28, 2025 via email
    ContributorAuthor

  7. simonmichael commented on Feb 28, 2025

    @simonmichael
    simonmichael
    on Feb 28, 2025
    Member

    I merged it in a funny way (which is not my preference, but sometimes I don't know how to avoid it).

  8. simonmichael
    closed this as completedon Feb 28, 2025
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