Re: VTE

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Cristiano De Michele <demichel na infn it> writes:
> I worked on that though you keep ignoring my patches, 

My memory is that Jacob asked for them in a particular form and you
didn't want to do that, I don't call that ignoring. I don't think it's
the optimal situation, either.

> About zvt maintaining: is not Jacob Berkman actual zvt widget
> maintainer? He answered to my posts to Gnome ML 
> and I thought he was the zvt maintainer...
> so a maintainer exists, am I wrong?

As far as I know, Jacob is the module owner, but isn't really trying
to fix the large-scale issues. Maybe he is.

> > VTE has a clean design and fixing it is going to be a matter of
> > one-line segfault cleanups and portability issues; easy stuff to get
> > stabilized in the 2.2 timeframe. Fixing Zvt is a matter of rewriting
> > big honking chunks of code that no one understands.
> I have partially done this but I guess you hadn't look
> at my work :(

I know you are working on it, yes. I don't see fixes landing in CVS,
for whatever reason - I don't know whose fault it is. And the fixes
would be large code changes.

The fact is that VTE works fine today, at least on Linux. The i18n
works, the fontconfig/Pango support works, the terminal emulation
works, it redraws with no flicker, and the accessibility is darn close
if it's not working.  And there's nothing fundamentally unportable in
there. It probably needs a portability layer for iconv and such.

It would not have been my preference to do a rewrite from scratch. You
may remember I suggested working from xterm a while back. But the work
is done, and it's good work.

Let's put it this way: at this point it's clear to me that for what's
in libzvt CVS and what's in VTE CVS, VTE works better and has nicer
code.

Now, maybe this will change; if someone really thinks it will change,
we can keep the conditional build stuff in gnome-terminal. But I'd
still like to move over to using VTE by default in CVS, because libzvt
as currently found in CVS is _broken_.

Havoc