Terminal emulators and command line arguments (again!)

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

Hi folks,

I've brought this up in the past on debian-devel, but didn't follow
through at the time. We have lots of X-based terminal programs (xterm,
rxvt, gnome-terminal, konsole, ...) which Provide:
x-terminal-emulator. That's great and useful, but the command line
interfaces to some of those have shifted over time and there is little
remaining consistency. For programs like Seyon that want to use one of
these terminal programs, there is no simple way to specify options
such as the name to use for its window, and that has been the cause of
several bugs over the years (#315945, #398508, #502001).

I want to fix this, but do it right. I can see some options here:

 1. Force all seyon users to install xterm by using a direct
    dependency on *just* xterm and call it instead of
    x-terminal-emulator

 2. Work out a standard set of command line options that must be
    supported by each package that Provides: x-terminal-emulator

 3. Write a wrapper script to deal with each possible terminal program
    and map from a standard set of options to the specific options for
    that program.

Ideally, I'd like us to do a combination of #2 and #3: work out the
standard set of options, and have each package provide a wrapper
script as necessary to support those options.

Thoughts?

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
Who needs computer imagery when you've got Brian Blessed?