Bug#624313: Please add an option to print the environment for a new terminal

[Enrico Zini]

Package: gnome-terminal
Version: 2.30.2-1
Severity: wishlist

Hello,

thank you for maintaining gnome-terminal.

When I open a new terminal, gnome-terminal exports a number of variables
in its environment: this is useful, for example, for proxy settings
(the variables *_proxy and *_PROXY, for example).

But suppose I change the proxy settings and I want to update those
variables in the terminals that are already open: I cannot really do
that: I'd have to close all existing terminals and reopen them to get
their environment updated.

It would be great if gnome-terminal could be made to print the updated
settings in a way that I can just source in the shell to update the
environment. If I could instead go in a running terminal and run
something like this:

  TEMPFILE=`mktemp`
  gnome-terminal --print-env > $TEMPFILE
  source $TEMPFILE
  rm $TEMPFILE

then I could update the environment of a running terminal with the new
settings, preserving shell history, backscroll and so on.

I reckon this could be tricky, because a cursory look at
gnome-terminal's code shows that it doesn't like to override http_proxy
if it is already set. If that would make something like --print-env a
useless strategy for these kinds of purposes, then maybe a more specific
--print-proxy-env option to print proxy settings from gconf regardless
of existing values of http_proxy would still do the trick.

But maybe there is a way for gnome-terminal to query the env settings
from its running instance, which can just run again the same env setup
code it run at startup, still knowing whether http_proxy was set in its
initial environment.

Besides the strategy that can be adopted, a way to source something to
update the environment of existing terminals would be very useful to me
indeed.


Ciao,

Enrico


-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.38-2-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages gnome-terminal depends on:
ii  gnome-terminal-data           2.30.2-1   Data files for the GNOME terminal 
ii  libatk1.0-0                   2.0.0-1    The ATK accessibility toolkit
ii  libc6                         2.11.2-11  Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libdbus-glib-1-2              0.92-1     simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgconf2-4                   2.28.1-6   GNOME configuration database syste
ii  libglib2.0-0                  2.28.6-1   The GLib library of C routines
ii  libgtk2.0-0                   2.24.4-3   The GTK+ graphical user interface 
ii  libice6                       2:1.0.7-1  X11 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii  libpango1.0-0                 1.28.3-6   Layout and rendering of internatio
ii  libsm6                        2:1.2.0-1  X11 Session Management library
ii  libvte9                       1:0.24.3-2 Terminal emulator widget for GTK+ 
ii  libx11-6                      2:1.4.3-1  X11 client-side library

Versions of packages gnome-terminal recommends:
ii  gvfs                     1.6.4-3         userspace virtual filesystem - ser
ii  yelp                     2.30.1+webkit-1 Help browser for GNOME

gnome-terminal suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information