Description of problem: It would be nice if xterm was compiled with 256 color support by default. One of the reasons is that the next version of Emacs has very good support for 256 color terminals. That support enables the syntax coloring on such terminals to look as good as it does on X11. To try this you can install Emacs from: http://people.redhat.com/petersen/emacs and in a 256 color enabled terminal run: TERM=xterm-256color emacs -nw then open a C file and look at the colors used for syntax highlighting. Bug #130664 added an rpm build option to enable the 256 color support, but it did not enable 256 color support by default.
OK, xterm-207-8 in Rawhide is now compiled with 256-color support by default, ie. by adding --enable-256-color to the configure. Unless the upstream maintainer can think of any problems with enabling 256-color support (I couldn't think of any), I'll enable it by default from now on. We'll see how that goes in Rawhide for a couple of weeks, and then I'll change the FC-4 xterm to compile in 256-color support by default also. BTW, terrific new emacs-22.0.50 version! I built it on FC-5 and it works great.
From User-Agent: XML-RPC xterm-207-2.FC4 has been pushed for FC4, which should resolve this issue. If these problems are still present in this version, then please make note of it in this bug report.