Odd lynx behavior in gnome-terminal

["Kevin D. Knerr, Sr." <kknerrsr ptdprolog net>]

I recently began switching my explicitly defined rxvt's to use
gnome-terminal and ran into an odd problem with lynx-2.8.2-1, namely
that it displayed only in monochrome.

Summary of my findings:

Lynx-2.8.2-1 does *not* accept the -color option to force color on
   (at least the Slackware 7.0 package reports it as invalid), even
   though the documentation indicates otherwise. (-nocolor *is* valid)
The Lynx documentation says that if $COLORTERM is set, color is enabled.
   Since gnome-terminal sets this environment variable, this test should
   be passed. (This was my stumbling block in figuring out the problem.)
The problem turns out to be the value of $TERM: the terminfo entry for
   xterm provides a value of -1 for colors, effectively enalbing only
   monochrome output. Setting $TERM to "rxvt" or "xterm-xf86-v333"
   resulted in a color-enabled Lynx.

My kludge:

Symlink /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm-xf86-v333 to ~/.terminfo/x/xterm

Final observations:

I haven't seen any other color-related issues in gnome-terminal. It
seems that most programs are allowing $COLORTERM to override the colors
value of the $TERM entry. Whether this is *correct* behavior is a matter
for debate.
 Should gnome-terminal use a different value for $TERM as it's default?
Perhaps a FAQ should be added to address this unexpected behavior.

Should this be an bug item for lynx? At the very least, the -color
option should be re-enabled or the documentation revised in the next
version, whenever that may be. If the lynx programmers decide this is
*not* a bug in lynx, I suggest the documentation should be revised to
indicate that setting $COLORTERM is insufficient to guarantee the use of
color if the value for $TERM disables color.

System notes:
   Slackware 7.0 base distribution
   lynx-2.8.2-rel.1
   gnome-libs-1.0.58
   gnome-core-1.1.8.1
   XFree86 v3.3.5
   ncurses-5.0-990918

Regards,

Barthel
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