Almost certainly can't make the 2012-06-25 meeting. I like the idea, but I'm concerned about compatibility. When you say older systems, how much older are we talking about?

Well it's no different in the compatibility of different terminals.

{{{
$ echo $TERM
rxvt-unicode
$ ssh solaris
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005
~> tput colors
tput: unknown terminal "rxvt-unicode"
}}}

So it's well known that you have to set your
terminal appropriately on certain systems.

Fedora/RHEL have long supported xterm-256color,
but Debian of the Lenny era at least did not by default,
requiring the ncurses-term package to be installed.

Also Mac OS X >= 10.7 uses xterm-256color so
this will aid in the knowledge of the issue,
and the chance that it's already setup correctly
on "older" systems.

It should be noted too that the failure mode isn't too bad,
and you'll just get warnings about unknown terminal,
but basic functionality will work just fine.

The release notes could simply be something like:

If you receive "unknown terminal" messages when using remote systems
over ssh, when you didn't before, then reset the TERM environment
variable to 'xterm' for the remote system.

Thanks. Given that, I can be +1.

+1 here.

Feature 256 Color Terminals was deferred on Jun 25 meeting, pending discussion on devel@ (+7); see meeting minutes for specific concerns.

Feature was approved on the Jul 09 meeting.