Bug#368916: gnome-terminal: $TERM should be set to gnome instead of xterm

[Egmont Koblinger]

Hi,

I've been an active contributor/developer of gnome-terminal in the
last 1.5 years.

I firmly disagree with Christoph's comment "Apparently upstream
intentionally breaks things or simply doesn't care."

We do care, and we worked hard recently to make gnome-terminal work
reasonably close to xterm.  Just look at the changelog and count how
many emulation fixes we had in the last 1.5 years!  Gnome-terminal has
set TERM=xterm for a long time, and xterm is our reference as for how
the terminal should work.

On the other hand, TERM=gnome, which is written and maintained
(probably not maintained actively too much) by xterm/terminfo's
maintainer, is probably way out of date.

Without looking at the details, I'm quite sure that TERM=xterm is way
closer to describe gnome-terminal's behavior than TERM=gnome.  And
even if someone updates and corrects the "gnome" terminal description,
we'd have to wait years until it's deployed to most of the hosts where
you'd want to ssh to.

Sure it's not perfect, but incorrectly reporting blink support is
probably a magnitudes smaller problem than the ones you'd face with
TERM=gnome.

*If* someone updates TERM=gnome and keeps it updated, changing to that
as the default might become a viable option in maybe 5 years or so.

Over the last year or two we fixed plenty of _actual_ bugs where the
emulation was incorrect.  Christoph found the tinyest and most
negligible feature that we promise to support but actually don't (i.e.
blinking), and riding this he wants to push towards a completely
different design which would have way more severe bugs which he can't
foresee.

With further details/discussions in the mainstream bugreport, I
recommend that Debian developers stick to gnome-terminal developers'
choice.


cheers,
egmont