Re: Launch the most relevant terminal emulator.
Hi Charles,
On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 12:45:18AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> I am packaging a program which depends on xterm because it opens a
> window to start a command line program. I am considering patching it to
> use x-terminal-emulator.
>
> But alternatives have a bad tendency to represent the latest program
> installed in the category, instead of the most wanted.
The alternatives system would have failed if this held true.
Nonetheless, if the local admins don't care: possibly, yes. :-)
> Is there a Debian
> way to detect wether the user runs a window manager which has a default
> console, and use this one ?
Sorry, I can't help you here. But IMO this indeed points to real
limitations of the alternatives system: it's system wide, and it's
static.
Regarding the first, see the six years (!) old bug #77828 [1]
and its fellow bugs about user alternatives. Regarding the second, one
could think about something like sensible-x-terminal, which could be
configured as per environment variables like the other sensible-*
commands. That would fulfill the requirement to be dynamic, too.
It seems that the idea of a sensible-x-terminal wrapper has already
come up in the past. See the discussions starting at [2] -- that time
it was apparantly motivated from i18n issues, though. Apparently there
was even a package 'sensible-xtermemu' created, however I cannot find
any evidence of that package besides some mailing list postings.
Perhaps some elder DD can tell why we still don't have
sensible-x-terminal in Debian?
HAND,
Nikolaus
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/77828
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2000/06/msg01753.html
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