And how, pray tell, may I know in advance what terminal will be used on the
other end of the serial link? Especially if it's a box people ssh into from
random places, using a plethora of various terminals on their side?
That's the most typical setup these days.
You can't really in that case; the terminal emulator will set the proper value. Maybe it's wise to run tset in that case so if it's not what is expected one can set it themselves. Or maybe they have set them themselves as I do;
I agree that this is the most common setup but it doesn't change a thing really. I set my x terminals to xterm-mono. When I use colors many things become unreadable. Switching between black on white and white on black is also troublesome without creating specialised palettes.
The only way I can see your idea to work, would be a list of ancient
terminals that lack color (either handcrafted or queried via termcap), and
relying on the user setting one of those. But that way would be way way too
niche to bother implementing in apt, I'd say.
Or the other way around as I proposed. The entire problem of knowing what and how to use color goes away when curses is used. Would you accept a patch for using that instead?
Kind regards,
Axel