On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 22:57:29 +0200, Matthias Geiger wrote:
Right, I (naively) assumed this is the same case as wayland-session
wayland-session isn't a standardized virtual package at the moment. I
proposed it in <https://bugs.debian.org/1004522> a few years ago, along
with x-session, but it was never integrated into Policy. The latest
version of that proposal at the time of writing is
<https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1004522#66>.
The meaning for wayland-session that I proposed in #1004522
intentionally didn't include an update-alternatives(1) registration, and
instead is defined in terms of /usr/share/wayland-sessions/*.desktop,
which is what typical Wayland-capable display managers like gdm and sddm
want to see.
The closest equivalent for a wayland-terminal-emulator would be a
terminal emulator whose .desktop file has Categories that include
System;TerminalEmulator;, and the various keys used by the proposed spec
implemented in xdg-terminal-exec (as a minimum, X-TerminalArgExec or
X-ExecArg).
If that proposed spec gets replaced by a use of Intent Apps, then I'd
expect the requirement to change to something involving a specific item
in the Interfaces list (probably Interfaces=org.freedesktop.Terminal1;
or something similar), which is the "modern" way to declare that an app
implements a specific programmatic interface (often but not necessarily
D-Bus-based, it can equally well be a command-line option convention
like the one involving X-TerminalArgExec). If this gets standardized, it
should preferably be standardized by a cross-distro group like
freedesktop.org, not by Debian, so that there is no barrier to adoption
by upstream projects and other distros that might not consider a
Debian-specific interface.
smcv
