Bug#871618: gnome-terminal: package should depend on dbus-x11

[Mark Hedges]

Yes, that's what I'm trying to do.  Why isn't X over ssh a supported use
case anymore?  That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.  What is the
alternative to use graphical programs on a remote machine?  Remote desktop?
 (And how do you do that, anyway?)  It seems like it would be really
inconvenient to change desktops every time I want to do something on a
different machine, instead of just moving the mouse to a different window.
But there are huge advantages to using gvim instead of vim, like if you
have line numbers on, in a terminal you will copy the line numbers with the
text, in gvim you won't.  (And it looks nicer.)

But who cares about what the "normal" use case is.  That sounds like
homogenization.  So what if it's not the most popular use case.  It used to
work, and enough people still do it that way -- why not support it?

Still not sure why gnome-terminal did work at one time, but now it does
not, and I did not add or remove any packages in the interim.

It's easier to use gnome-terminal for a remote login, because then I can
create tabs, and if I already have sudo permissions, it extends the sudo
permissions to all the tabs, if I don't run as a login shell.  I think...
at least, sometimes I have seen it behave this way, which seemed
convenient.  At the least, it's more convenient to hit ctrl-shift-T to get
a new window than to have to type `ssh whatever` in a new window on my
local system.

I guess I'll will be back to using lxterminal instead... the options are
not as nice as gnome-terminal.

Mark

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 8:51 AM, Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 10 Aug 2017 at 14:30:30 -0700, Mark Hedges wrote:
> > I verified that other X programs are working through the ssh tunnel,
> like xeyes
> > and gvim.
>
> I didn't see you mention previously that you were using a ssh tunnel.
> Are you using X-forwarding to have their windows appear on a machine that
> is not the one actually executing the code?
>
> This is not the normal use-case for Linux desktop software (any more), and
> programs with the same client/server, single-instance behaviour as
> gnome-terminal will not necessarily work in this environment. The model of
> what it means to be in a login session that is used by dbus-user-session
> is not designed for X-forwarding, and it is possible that dbus-x11 works
> better in that environment.
>
> The central issue with dbus-x11 is that nobody is sure what is meant to
> work and what merely works by coincidence, which makes it difficult to
> reason about and maintain - if someone reports a bug, we cannot know
> whether fixing that bug will break it for someone else (for example,
> you). That's why we prefer dbus-user-session for new installations -
> its model has the advantage of being very simple.
>
> Adding a dbus-x11 dependency to gnome-terminal for this would not be
> appropriate. We set the dependencies according to what works for the
> most normal use-cases, and X-forwarding is not among those any more -
> if that is what you want then it's up to you to arrange for it to work.
>
> If you want to use dbus-x11's model of what is a session (one session per
> (uid, machine, X11 display) tuple) then you will need to remove the
> dbus-user-session package in addition to installing dbus-x11. If you have
> both installed, and you are booting with systemd, then dbus-user-session
> takes precedence.
>
>     S
>
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