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

[Sune Vuorela <nospam@vuorela.dk>]

On 2008-10-12, Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com> wrote:
> 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?

I dont think supporting title and stuff should be required for providing
x-terminal-emulator. I think we could require to handle -e properly, but
not much more than that.

/sune