#227 Terminal type `dumb' is not smart enough to run Info

[eliz]

info.exe from the latest port of Texinfo 4.8 (and previous
ports, judging by past traffic) fails to start. It displays the
following message:

Terminal type `dumb' is not smart enough to run Info

This happens because the environment variable TERM is
not set on a typical Windows box.

On a Unix or GNU/Linux machine, the solution is to set
TERM to the appropriate terminal name. But in the case of
the Gnuwin32 port of Texinfo, although the package comes
with libtermcap and with termcap database, one cannot set
TERM to anything useful, since the Windows shell window
doesn't support ANSI escape sequences, nor any other
standards of cursor positioning on text-mode terminals.
Thus, setting TERM to something like vt100 or ansi
eliminates the above error message and allows Info to start,
but the display is all messed up with wscape sequences
displayed literally by the Windows console driver.

After searching high and low for an ANSI driver that would
work with Windows XP, I conclude that there's no such
thing. So someone should really port Info to Windows by
replacing the calls to tputs etc. with Windows console
functions. I know that such a solution is possible because
there's a Gnuwin32 port of Less that works and because
there's a DOS (a.k.a. DJGPP) port of Info whose code the
Gnuwin32 port could steal.