Bug#887649: cdebconf-gtk-terminal: Please don't depend on unmaintained vte

[Egmont Koblinger <egmont@gmail.com>]

Hi guys,

> We don't do c++ in d-i.

Unfortunately this sounds really problematic. As of version 0.42 vte
has been using (more and more) C++. This is not like Ubuntu's PCRE2
hack which is a matter of a few hours of work reverting and merging a
few commits. It's reasonably impossible to revert to plain C and
maintain that as a fork, and upstream has no intention to revert to C
either.

You might want to have a special libvte2.91 0.40 package, or revive
libvte2.90 0.36 for the installer. These are also abandoned by
upstream, but already significantly less buggier than 0.28, probably
good enough for the installer (after all, 0.28 was good enough until
now), and allow you to drop the gtk2 dependencies, potentially buying
you many more years (perhaps you'll be good until you decide to
replace gtk3 by gtk4 in the installer).

I understand it's far from ideal. Other possibilities include ditching
the "no c++" policy (pulling in a 1.5M lib for the sake of a 400k one,
sigh), maybe seeing if there's a good enough "minimal" replacement for
libstdc++ providing just the basics that are sufficient for VTE; or
finding a different terminal emulator solution.

cheers,
egmont