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

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