On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 13:33, Simon McVittie <[email protected]> wrote:
On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 10:30:45 +0200, Matthias Geiger wrote:
+# Wayland
+ - name: wayland-terminal-emulator
+ description: a wayland client which emulates a terminal with a
terminfo description
What's the intended purpose of this virtual package? Which packages are
expected to interact with it?
If providing the virtual package requires implementing a specific
alternative (via dpkg's update-alternatives), then I think the entry in
Policy's list should say so. But I'm already not a fan of the use of
alternatives for x-terminal-emulator, because I think it's a bad fit for
what desktop environment users expect.
Right, I (naively) assumed this is the same case as wayland-session
I think a better model for applications that want to start "some
suitable terminal emulator" is xdg-terminal-exec, which implements a
proposed freedesktop.org spec modelled on fdo MIME-type and URI-scheme
handlers, with a system-wide fallback, a per-desktop-environment
preference and a per-user configuration override. Or, this
terminal-specific proposal might be replaced at some point by an
interface name for the more general "intent apps" spec proposal,
<https://specifications.freedesktop.org/intent-apps/latest/>, which is
syntactically different but the same general shape.
And how does this work for terminals that don't/can't know whether they
implement native Wayland? GTK 3+ applications can typically be both a
Wayland client and an X11 client, using whichever protocol is more
appropriate at runtime, and I know there are also Wayland-only terminal
emulators like foot and X11-only terminal emulators like xterm. But if
I understand the Qt ecosystem correctly, a Qt-based application like
Konsole might or might not be able to implement native Wayland,
depending on whether the plugins in the qt6-wayland package are
installed, with no code changes to the application itself - so is
konsole a wayland-terminal-emulator or not?
Right, I agree this warrants further discussion. As Bill described,
I agree to have a generic *terminal package, as I believe
x-terminal-emulator is not timely anymore in the age of pure
wayland-only terminal emulators like foot.
best,
werdahias
