"WARNING: terminal is not fully functional" when elevate privileges with opendoas #692

After updating to 1.9.0 release, some commands are not executed properly when run with doas.

E.g.
$ doas systemctl status bluetooth
Output: "WARNING: terminal is not fully functional"
$ doas vi /path/to/file
Output: file is not displayed properly, only the first line of file is displayed
$ doas dmesg
Output: is not colorized

These problems only happen after updating to 1.9.0. I'm using sway.

// Thank you for this awesome terminal emulator.

This is most likely because doas doesn't inherit TERMINFO from the user environment and foot's terminfo is installed in a non-standard location since 1.9.0. See also #673 for background.

There are multiple possible workarounds: You could teach doas to inherit TERMINFO or install foot's terminfo in the standard location manually, for example.

I'm not familiar with doas, but sounds like this: #691

Note that once the next ncurses release is out, this will be a much much smaller problem, since we'll then gracefully fall back to its version of foot's terminfo.

I will also happily add information on how to workaround this with doas to the man pages, just like sudo and ssh had already been documented.

I just need someone to tell me what the workaround is :)

Thank both of you for godspeed answers. Tbh, I have no idea how to get that workaround. Either @sterni provides a more detailed instruction or I will do my own search based on his/her suggestions. Knowing the cause and there are solutions out there, feel free to close my issue.

https://man.openbsd.org/doas.conf.5#setenv looks right

@dnkl You're right. I never use this function before.
Setting: permit setenv { -ENV TERMINFO=/usr/share/foot/terminfo } :wheel
solve the problem. Thanks a ton.

Thanks for the feedback!

One more question if I may; does it also work with { -ENV TERMINFO }? I.e without assigning to it?

Yes, it works. Great, now my favorite terminal emu is back to action.