on a gnome-terminal, if you 'less' a small file, you get a screenful of
rubbish from the last program to use the alternate screen image (the last
invocation of less, for instance).

if you do the same thing on an xterm, the alternate screen is not used and
you can see that the file is short because the prompt doesn't roll off the
screen...you have context.

the behavior of less is severely broken on gnome-terminal.

gnome terminal should either behave like xterm (it says it's an xterm) or
it should have a different term{cap,info} entry...