Bug#1059446: libvte-dev: Please consider enabling sixel support

[Simon McVittie]

Control: forwarded -1 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/253
Control: tags -1 + wontfix

On Fri, 29 Dec 2023 at 16:43:10 -0500, Jeremy Bícha wrote:
>On Mon, Dec 25, 2023 at 2:27 PM Matthias Geiger <werdahias at riseup.net> wrote:
>> please consider enabling sixel support for libvte. At the moment this
>> prevents images from rendering in vte-based terminals. While it is still
>> experimental I think this could be enabled so users can test the feature
>> and report possible bugs.
>
>It's not only "experimental" but upstream keeps removing the WIP sixel
>feature before finalizing each new stable release major series.

I think we would be doing our users a disservice to be enabling a 
feature that upstream specifically does not think is ready. If you would 
like to test sixel rendering and help to fix its bugs, I would recommend 
compiling a local libvte from source and doing development there.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/vte/-/issues/253#note_1872962 has a 
description of the known unresolved issues in the sixel feature. Until 
upstream believes those issues have been resolved, I don't think we 
should be touching this in Debian (hence the wontfix tag). The packaging 
of upstream software in Debian is a place to do integration and QA, not 
major feature development, and the only sustainable way to add features 
is "upstream first".

     smcv