Bug#1136306: debian-policy: Proposing new wayland-terminal-emulator alternative and virtual package

On Sun, 14 Jun 2026 at 14:31:01 +0200, Bill Allombert wrote:
>What about sensible-terminal ?

That's closer (it at least has a mechanism for per-desktop defaults), 
but has the disadvantage of being Debian-specific, and its per-user 
configuration is by creating new tool-specific environment variables.

A non-Debian-specific settings UI like gnome-control-center or KDE's 
systemsettings isn't going to be able to configure this in the expected 
way for several reasons:

- there isn't a particularly good universal way to set environment
   variables for the session: environment.d(5) is the closest, but is
   systemd-specific as far as I know
- because of how environment variable inheritance works, changing an
   environment variable in environment.d(5) won't take effect until the
   user logs out and back in (and perhaps not even then, if session
   lingering is enabled)
- the non-Debian-specific settings UIs typically won't want to include
   code for a Debian-specific setting, and desktop teams with limited
   resources would prefer not to patch new logic into a fork of those UIs

I still think xdg-terminal-exec is the closest thing we have to a good 
way to choose an appropriate terminal.

Coming back to the topic of wayland-terminal-emulator, sensible-terminal 
has the same limitation as xdg-terminal-exec that it assumes all 
terminals are capable of running in any desktop session (Wayland or 
X11), which is true for typical X11/Wayland terminals like ptyxis and 
konsole, and also true for X11-only terminals like xterm, but not true 
for Wayland-only terminals like foot.

     smcv