Bug#348775: general: terminal emulators' alternatives settings' priorities annoy users
Hi,
Simon Richter wrote:
> The problem at hand is the proposed (and implemented) solution for
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=332223 .
[lxterm having higher priority than konsole on KDE systems]
>
> I'm unconvinced that bumping the priority on the other terminal
> emulators is an adequate solution, hence I'm opening this "general" bug
> for discussion on how to reflect individual users' choices properly.
>
> It has been suggested on #debian-devel that maybe creating a per-user
> ~/bin with its own alternatives links might be an option, however there
> needs to be a fallback mechanism in case the currently selected option
> goes away.
To make this concrete:
. unlike browsers with $BROWSER and desktop-specific settings, there
is no standard, cross-distro way to make a user-specific choice of
terminal
. apps integrated into Debian can and should be using
x-terminal-emulator, without an explicit "/usr/bin/", as hinted at
by policy §6.1 "Introduction to package maintainer scripts"
. therefore users can put a script implementing whatever policy they
choose in ~/bin/x-terminal-emulator, but:
1. that requires more know-how than many users have
2. applications not integrated into Debian would just use xterm
anyway, which is not so great.
To solve (1): an interested person could make an app that installs an
easily configurable ~/bin/x-terminal-emulator script. This seems
like a rfp rather than a general bug, if anything.
To solve (2): one could introduce a TERMINAL environment variable
analogous to MAILER and implement xdg-terminal that reads it. Please
clone this bug and assign to xdg-utils if interested.
Sensible?
Jonathan
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