Bug#83063: PROPOSED] enhanced x-terminal-emulator policy

["Marcelo E. Magallon" <mmagallo@debian.org>]

>> Branden Robinson <branden@debian.org> writes:

 > +	    <item>If the terminal emulator supports a command-line option of
 > +	    the form "-e <emph>command</emph>", where this option causes a
 > +	    new terminal window to appear running <emph>command</emph>, add
 > +	    10 points.</item>
 > +	    <item>If the terminal emulator supports a command-line option
 > +	    of the form "-T <emph>title</emph>", where this option causes a
 > +	    new terminal window to appear with <emph>title</emph> passed to
 > +	    the window manager via an appropriate hint for titlebar
 > +	    decoration, add 10 points.</item>

 The fact that supporting -e and -T is optional is problematic.  menu's
 menu.h reads:

 function term()=\
     "x-terminal-emulator " ifnempty($visible,"-ut") \
             ifnempty($geometry,"-geometry ") $geometry \
             " -T \"" title() "\""  " -e " $command

 a x-terminal-emulator that doesn't support -e and -T will fail to
 start, and most window managers make it difficult to communicate the
 cause of error back to the user.

 Besides, probably menu is a bit optimistic if it expects support for
 -ut and -geometry, but IMO most users would also expect something like
 this.  Perhaps asking for support of '-name' is a good compromise?
 Using -name you can use X resources to specify geometry and other
 parameters users are likely to expect as configurable.  Of course, this
 implies x-terminal-emulator must support X resources (which, AFAIK,
 narrows the choices down to xterm, rxvt and rxvt's forks).  Personally
 I'd like x-terminal-emulator to support -name because wmaker uses that
 information (it's the only *reasonable* way in which a window manager
 can obtain information about what's running on the terminal -- this
 isn't a one to one correspondence, for example, I use a xterm with a
 -name 'mail' where mutt runs), which in turn allows for customizing,
 among other things, the icon associated with the program.  I don't know
 if other window managers use this information in any way.

 What I'd like to see is make the implementation of -e and -T mandatory,
 and, in the case where the actual program doesn't support those
 parameters with those specific meanings, point the alternative to a
 wrapper script that does the proper translation.  In addition to -e and
 -T, I'd also like -geometry, -ut (current practice) and, because of the
 reasons explained before, -name.

--
Marcelo