view CONTRIBUTORS @ 24028:a78888d98606

color: be more conservative about setting ANSI mode on Windows (BC)

The current color mode detection on Windows assumes the presence of the
TERM environment variable assumes ANSI is supported. However, this isn't
always true. In MSYS (commonly found as part of MinGW), TERM is set to
"cygwin" and the auto resolved color mode of "ansi" results in escape
sequences getting printed literally to the terminal. The output is
very difficult to read and results in a bad user experience. A
workaround is to activate the pager and have it attend all commands (GNU
less in MSYS can render ANSI terminal sequences properly).

In Cygwin, TERM is set to "xterm." Furthermore, Cygwin supports
displaying these terminal sequences properly (unlike MSYS).

This patch changes the mode auto-detection logic on Windows to be more
conservative about selecting the "ansi" mode. We now only select the
"ansi" mode if TERM is set and it contains the string "xterm" or if
we were unable to talk to win32 APIs to determine the settings. There is
a chance this may take away "ansi" from a terminal that actually
supports it. The recourse for this would be to patch the detection to
act appropriately and to override color.mode until that patch has
landed. However, the author believes this regression is tolerable, since
it means MSYS users won't have gibberish printed by default.

Since MSYS's common pager (less) supports display of ANSI sequences,
there is room to patch the color extensions so it can select the ANSI
color mode if a pager is activated.

Mozilla (being an active user of MSYS) would really appreciate this
being part of the stable branch. However, since I believe it is BC, I
haven't explicitly requested application to stable since I figure that
request will be denied.

[This file is here for historical purposes, all recent contributors
should appear in the changelog directly]

Andrea Arcangeli <andrea at suse.de>
Thomas Arendsen Hein <thomas at intevation.de>
Goffredo Baroncelli <kreijack at libero.it>
Muli Ben-Yehuda <mulix at mulix.org>
Mikael Berthe <mikael at lilotux.net>
Benoit Boissinot <bboissin at gmail.com>
Brendan Cully <brendan at kublai.com>
Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml at free.fr>
Jake Edge <jake at edge2.net>
Michael Fetterman <michael.fetterman at intel.com>
Edouard Gomez <ed.gomez at free.fr>
Eric Hopper <hopper at omnifarious.org>
Alecs King <alecsk at gmail.com>
Volker Kleinfeld <Volker.Kleinfeld at gmx.de>
Vadim Lebedev <vadim at mbdsys.com>
Christopher Li <hg at chrisli.org>
Chris Mason <mason at suse.com>
Colin McMillen <mcmillen at cs.cmu.edu>
Wojciech Milkowski <wmilkowski at interia.pl>
Chad Netzer <chad.netzer at gmail.com>
Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
Vicent Seguí Pascual <vseguip at gmail.com>
Sean Perry <shaleh at speakeasy.net>
Nguyen Anh Quynh <aquynh at gmail.com>
Ollivier Robert <roberto at keltia.freenix.fr>
Alexander Schremmer <alex at alexanderweb.de>
Arun Sharma <arun at sharma-home.net>
Josef "Jeff" Sipek <jeffpc at optonline.net>
Kevin Smith <yarcs at qualitycode.com>
TK Soh <teekaysoh at yahoo.com>
Radoslaw Szkodzinski <astralstorm at gorzow.mm.pl>
Samuel Tardieu <sam at rfc1149.net>
K Thananchayan <thananck at yahoo.com>
Andrew Thompson <andrewkt at aktzero.com>
Michael S. Tsirkin <mst at mellanox.co.il>
Rafael Villar Burke <pachi at mmn-arquitectos.com>
Tristan Wibberley <tristan at wibberley.org>
Mark Williamson <mark.williamson at cl.cam.ac.uk>