Debian maintainers need to take it easy

Recently, I started using Ubuntu again (there was a spare Thinkpad-T61 in the office), and I've found that once again, debian's psychotic need to break things into micro-sized packages has bitten me in the ass.

For the longest time I've used mrxvt as my primary terminal emulator. It's got 256 colors, tabs, a cool little feature that lets you edit the scrollback in Vim, and most importantly, it renders the jmk-neep-8 font that I have an unnatural obsession with. The problem has always been that on debian, the terminfo entries for mrxvt (and quite a number of other terminals) were never present. Now I've found the answer: the "ncurses-term" package. Why debian doesn't install the rxvt-256color termcap is a mystery to me. Basically I do this to get 256 color vim by default:

if [[ "$(uname -s)" == "Linux" ]]; then
  if [[ -e /usr/share/terminfo/r/rxvt-256color && \
             "$COLORTERM" == "rxvt-xpm" ]]; then
    export TERM="rxvt-256color"
  fi
fi

Then in .vimrc:

if $TERM =~ '\(rxvt\|xterm\)-256color\|screen-bce'
  set t_Co=256
  colorscheme desert256
endif

And magic! A wonderful 256 color experience in the terminal, using bitmapped fonts on the best linux distro (as God intended).

</rant>