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Re: Terminal emulators and command line arguments (again!)



Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>:
> 
>  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

Just curious, but why 2 & 3?  Why isn't 1 considered the simplest
solution?  xterm is ca. 300k.  What Seyon users can't afford 300k disk
space or its RSS?

vi's installed on every *nix box on the planet.  Why shouldn't xterm
be on every X install on the planet?  My /usr/bin/vim.basic is 1.3 Mb.

1 seems a far more robust solution to me.


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