[Pkg-rust-maintainers] Bug#1103347: Does not accept -name command line option

[James McCoy]

Control: severity -1 wishlist

On Wed, Apr 16, 2025 at 05:09:02PM +0200, martin f krafft wrote:
>Unfortunately, Alacritty does not accept the -name command-line option, and
>instead spews and error message. This is a problem when it is used as a drop-in
>to x-terminal-emulator, which sometimes gets passed the -name option (supported
>by every other terminal emulator that I know).

Just checking the other terminals I have installed, kitty and 
gnome-terminal also do not support this option. Although gnome-terminal 
added a wrapper to align with x-terminal-emulator's requirements and 
included support for a few "non-standard options", "-name" being one of 
them.

>albatross:~% x-terminal-emulator -name foo                                      #(pts/33) 16 17:06:53.105
>error: unexpected argument '-n' found
>
>Usage: x-terminal-emulator [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]
>
>For more information, try '--help'.

For what it's worth, there's no expectation that x-terminal-emulator 
supports this option. The only requirements are documented in Policy 
11.8.3:

> To be an "x-terminal-emulator", a program must:
> 
> * Be able to emulate a DEC VT100 terminal, or a compatible terminal.
> 
> * Support the command-line option "-e command", which creates a new
>   terminal window [6] and runs the specified command.  <command> may
>   be multiple arguments, which form the argument list to the executed
>   program.  In other words, the behavior is as though the arguments
>   were passed directly to "execvp", bypassing the shell. ("xterm"’s
>   behavior of falling back on using the shell if "-e" had a single
>   argument and exec failed is permissible but not required.)
> 
> * Support the command-line option "-T title", which creates a new
>   terminal window with the window title title.

I did work with upstream to get -T supported before having it provide 
the x-terminal-emulator alternative, but they already had support for
--title so it was just aliasing the existing option.

Anything passing "-name" to x-terminal-emulator is expecting more than
the abstraction guarantees. I'm not sure that's something that's worth
supporting.

Cheers,
-- 
James
GPG Key: 4096R/91BF BF4D 6956 BD5D F7B7  2D23 DFE6 91AE 331B A3DB