[Pkg-gnome-extras-maintainers] Bug#1144676: Upgrading gnome-terminal kills existing terminals

[Simon McVittie]

Control: severity -1 serious

On Mon, 17 Aug 2026 at 20:52:58 -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
>With previous versions of gnome-terminal, upgrading would take effect on
>a subsequent run of gnome-terminal, but would not interrupt existing
>terminals. However, with the new version of gnome-terminal, upgrading
>kills all open gnome-terminal sessions; it appears that it restarts the
>systemd user unit.

This is probably a side-effect of the debhelper compat level bump to 14, 
which restarts systemd user units by default. I agree that this is 
undesirable for the specific case of a terminal emulator, and I don't 
think the package should migrate to testing until this is fixed.

I now wonder whether gnome-console has the same bug?

ptyxis (the default terminal emulator in new installations of Debian 
testing with GNOME) doesn't, but probably only because it hasn't been 
migrated to compat level 14 yet. We should be careful not to introduce 
that bug when it does move to compat level 14.

     smcv