Some missing context here is the original bug report from martin f krafft:
Unfortunately, Kitty 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).
If the maintainers of kitty don't want to add a -name option, then I
think this should be closed as "won't fix". Policy is clear about the
requirements for a terminal to be available via the x-terminal-emulator
alternative:
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* [...]
- Support the command-line option -T *title* [...]
Notably, the -name option does not appear anywhere on that list.
So if some other piece of software is making the assumption that every
x-terminal-emulator supports an xterm-compatible "-name" option, then
that's a bug in the other piece of software, not a bug in kitty. The
same is true for "-title" (the x-terminal-emulator specification only
requires the short form -T to be supported).
*Some* x-terminal-emulator implementations, like xterm and
the Debian-specific gnome-terminal.wrapper, additionally support options
like "-name" and "-title", but there is no guarantee about those.
ptyxis and GNOME Console (kgx) don't support "-name" either.
It would be possible to have a wrapper script that parses a subset of
xterm command-line syntax and translates it to kitty syntax
(/usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper in the gnome-terminal package, which
does the same thing for gnome-terminal, would be a good starting point),
but I think it's entirely reasonable for the Debian maintainers of kitty
not to want to be responsible for maintaining such a thing.
On Wed, 23 Apr 2025 at 20:19:09 +0530, Nilesh Patra wrote:
On 23 April 2025 7:36:44 pm IST, martin f krafft <madd...@debian.org> wrote:
Regarding the following, written by "Nilesh Patra" on 2025-04-22 at 17:59 Uhr
+0530:
As per upstream we need to use "xdg-terminal-exec". However, I could not find
an alternative system by that name yet in Debian.
The xdg-terminal-exec protocol does not involve /etc/alternatives, but
anyway it also doesn't (guarantee to) support a "-name" option. (It also
doesn't support either "-title" or "-T".)
xdg-terminal-exec is a proposed specification for launching a command in
"any suitable terminal emulator", in a terminal-agnostic way, vaguely
similar to x-terminal-emulator. The reference implementation of this
protocol is available in the xdg-terminal-exec package in trixie, and
the protocol itself is described in
/usr/share/doc/xdg-terminal-exec/README.md.gz in that package.
`x-terminal-emulator` and the alternatives system is a bit antiquated
Specifically, the main advantage of xdg-terminal-exec over
x-terminal-emulator, other than it not being Debian-specific, is that
that by default it will try to choose an appropriate terminal emulator
for the desktop environment. For example, suppose GNOME user Greta and
KDE Plasma user Kevin share a computer, they both use mutt as their email
client and mailto: handler, and neither of them has reconfigured their
preferred terminal.
With those prerequisites, when both users click on mailto: links, Greta
would reasonably expect to see mutt open in gnome-terminal or similar,
while Kevin would expect Konsole or similar. xdg-terminal-exec can do
this. x-terminal-emulator cannot: there is only one
/etc/alternatives/x-terminal-emulator, system-wide, which cannot
simultaneously point to /usr/bin/gnome-terminal.wrapper and to
/usr/bin/konsole, so at least one of our two users will be disappointed.
(xdg-terminal-exec is also configurable per-user via files in ~/.config,
whereas the closest thing we have to being able to configure
x-terminal-emulator per-user is for each user to figure out how to alter
their $PATH to include ~/bin or ~/.local/bin or similar, and then put a
x-terminal-emulator symlink in that directory pointing to their
preferred implementation.)
smcv
