Re: sensible-x-terminal and x-terminal-emulator

[Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>]

From: Tomasz Wegrzanowski <maniek@beer.com>
Subject: Re: sensible-x-terminal and x-terminal-emulator
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 09:09:44 +0200

> I proposed sensible-xterm some time ago,
> and there was bigflamawar about this issue :-).
> Check archives (don't remember from when, search for sensible-xterm).

Thank you and I checked archives.  It was about around Oct. 1999
and I was a bit frightend with the bigflamawar.

Roughly summing up, reasons to deny the request are

- it is not necessary because x-terminal-emulator (alternative 
  method) can provide a sufficient mechanism.
- sensible-pager and sensible-editor use the traditional UNIX 
  environment variables, PAGER, EDITOR etc., but XTERM or something 
  is Debian specific and so not desirable.
- if necessary a user can set up privately with, for example,
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
ln -s /usr/bin/X11/my-favorite-terminal-emulator /home/bin/x-terminal-emulator

But the necessity depends on the cases.  For English-speaking
and/or European people, X terminals might be the problem of 
preference but for us multibyte-language speakers it is the
inevitable problem.  And as Debian is highly internationalized
so the necessity increases much, IMHO.

It is true that PAGER, EDITOR etc. are the traditional UNIX 
environment variables but XTERM (or something) is not, however
update-alternatives i.e. x-terminal-emulator is already Debian 
specific.  And although x-terminal-emulator is Debian specific 
it provides us very good mechanism so there is no reason to deny 
the proposal by saying it is Debian specific.

I admit also that there are many ways to set up appropriately
by individual users but if Debian can provide some flexible
mechanism to do so, isn't it nice?

And even if Debian provides sensible-x-terminal, I think that there
remain delicate settings which can be delt with only by individual
users but it will make such settings much easier to do than the case
without sensible-x-terminal.

Best Regards,			2000.6.22

--
 Debian JP Developer - much more I18N of Debian
 Atsuhito Kohda <kohda@pm.tokushima-u.ac.jp>
 Department of Math., Tokushima Univ.