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Draft: Register as an x-terminal-emulator

Jeremy Bícha requested to merge wip/x-terminal-emulator into debian/master

There are details here I am unsure about.

  1. What priority to use? Debian Policy § 11.8.3 suggests using priority 20 but other priorites are commonly used instead.

  2. I believe it makes sense for this package to not have Provides: x-terminal-emulator because this package has that as Depends instead.

  3. If xdg-terminal-exec depends on gnome-terminal | ptyxis | x-terminal-emulator (etc.), is it acceptable for gnome-terminal to then depend on xdg-terminal-exec? Or do I need it to be Recommends instead? It's at least not a circular build dependency and there are alternatives.

Other comments

  1. The basic idea of xdg-terminal-exec is that it should be possible for users to set their default terminal differently than other users on the same system, similar to what can be done with web browsers, but this use case isn't covered by the existing Debian alternatives system.

  2. This may not be the final solution at all. Both the GNOME Terminal and Ptyxis developers like the idea of terminal XDG Intents better. My opinion is that xdg-terminal-exec works now, but XDG Intents is not ready yet.

  3. I will probably add several explicit terminal alternative ahead of xterm in the Depends list. I think this at least helps Ubuntu with the tools they use to build ISOs.

  4. There isn't much of a GUI for users to configure yet. GNOME Terminal and Ptyxis >= 48 Beta have an option in their preferences but GNOME Terminal's behavior is currently too aggressive . But it can be configured with text files; see the manpage

  5. I do think I'll have Debian GNOME install xdg-terminal-exec by default for Trixie since glib is already set to use it. I think it would be a benefit to our users if x-terminal-emulator respected the xdg-terminal-exec preference by default.

Edited by Jeremy Bícha

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