Package: sensible-utils
Version: 0.0.26
Severity: wishlist
File: /usr/bin/sensible-terminal
sensible-terminal was mentioned in a recent discussion on Policy issue
#1136306, regarding a proposed wayland-terminal-emulator virtual
package.
xdg-terminal-exec is a reference implementation of a proposed
freedesktop.org spec for starting a terminal emulator, which has several
advantages over sensible-terminal:
* It isn't Debian-specific, meaning that upstream software is more
likely to support it without Debian-specific patches. To be useful,
an abstraction like this needs to be supported by providers (terminal
emulators), consumers (applications and libraries that want to start a
terminal emulator), and configuration UIs (gnome-control-center,
KDE's systemsettings, and their equivalents in other desktops).
* It can cope with terminal emulators that don't have an
xterm-compatible "-e" argument. Notably this includes gnome-terminal,
which wants to be invoked as "gnome-terminal -- COMMAND ARGS..." as its
equivalent of "xterm -e COMMAND ARGS..." so that it can use normal
GNU-style command-line parsing.
* It can be configured on a per-user basis by writing files into
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME, without needing to set new tool-specific environment
variables like $TERMINAL_EMULATOR or $SENSIBLE_TERMINAL_EMULATOR.
This is important for two reasons:
- Because of how environment variables inherit from parent to child,
setting an environment variable can't be "instant-apply": after
changing it, the user has to terminate all processes that already
inherited it (in practice, log out and log back in, or reboot).
- There's no universal, declarative way to set an environment variable
for all login sessions, which UIs like gnome-control-center and
systemsettings would need if they wanted to make this configurable.
The closest I'm aware of is environment.d(5), which I think only
systemd implements (although I would encourage non-systemd session
managers to implement it too, because it's a completely reasonable
non-systemd-specific spec).
Unfortunately the configuration design that xdg-terminal-exec implements
has not been published as a formal spec by freedesktop.org, but it's the
best thing we have available right now. It's modelled on the way that
fdo MIME-type handlers and URI scheme handlers are registered, which
gives it a lot of good properties "for free", like desktop-specific
defaults, per-user configuration, and a design where per-user
configuration can be instant-apply.
It's possible that freedesktop.org will end up recommending that
terminals are registered via the more general Intent Apps spec
<https://specifications.freedesktop.org/intent-apps/latest/>. If it
does, then I would expect xdg-terminal-exec to switch to using that,
plus backward compatibility to its previous draft spec.
I'm not sure that a Debian-specific sensible-terminal is a good thing to
have, but since we do already have it and removing it would be a
compatibility break, I think it should delegate to xdg-terminal-exec
when available. I'd suggest that xdg-terminal-exec should be higher
priority than sensible-terminal-$desktop or x-terminal-emulator, but
perhaps lower priority than $TERMINAL_EMULATOR or
$SENSIBLE_TERMINAL_EMULATOR.
Thanks,
smcv
