Bug#1039579: gnome-terminal.wrapper does not support the '--' syntax itself

[Christophe Lohr]

Dear Simon,
   Thank you very much for your quick and comprehensive explanations. 
(Could be a manpage by itself!)

Indeed, I'm scripting some tasks needing a terminal in an agnostic way. 
So, 'x-terminal-emulator -e ...' is the best way for me.

I am grateful for your guidance.

Best regards,
Christophe

Le 27/06/2023 à 15:13, Simon McVittie a écrit :
> On Tue, 27 Jun 2023 at 14:11:35 +0200, Christophe Lohr wrote:
>>    The code of this wrapper make several rearrangements to convert '-e' and '-x'
>> options into the '--' syntax, but it seems to not support itself the '--'
>> syntax on its command line. Isn't it?
>> Is this an oversight or I am wrong?
>> May I suggest adding support for "--"?
> Please could you clarify why it would be useful for gnome-terminal.wrapper
> to support the "--" syntax?
>
> The only purpose of gnome-terminal.wrapper is to implement Debian's
> x-terminal-emulator interface as defined in
> <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-customized-programs.html#packages-providing-a-terminal-emulator>,
> which is a subset of xterm's command-line interface and therefore uses
> "-e" to prefix a command to run. xterm does not support the GNU-style "--"
> and there is no guarantee that an implementation of x-terminal-emulator
> will support it either, so accepting it in gnome-terminal.wrapper
> would just make it a bit more likely for people to write calls like
> "x-terminal-emulator -- less /etc/hosts" which will actually only work
> for a few specific terminal emulators.
>
> If you're writing code that runs gnome-terminal (specifically) as a
> subprocess, please use the gnome-terminal command and its preferred
> "--" syntax.  There is no need to use the wrapper in this case, and in
> fact it would be counterproductive to do so: all it does is to slow down
> startup a little bit, and make some features unavailable.
>
> If you're writing code that runs the generic x-terminal-emulator command
> as a subprocess, then you will have to use the "-e" syntax, otherwise it
> won't work correctly with xterm (and probably many other terminal emulators).
>
> If you're writing code that supports multiple specific commands as ways
> to run a command in a terminal, then it needs to "just know" whether
> each one expects "-e", "-x", "--", or no argument at all. The table of
> known terminals in
> <https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/blob/2.76.3/gio/gdesktopappinfo.c#L2698>
> is an example of this technique. Everyone involved recognises that this
> is not a pleasant interface, but that's the price we pay for portability.
>
>      smcv