Tips on hacking VTE

["Petrin, Benjamin" <b petrin WPI EDU>]

Hello all,

I'm hoping to work on the virtual terminal emulator. Specifically, I would like to work on the following feature enhancement: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336238. I'm looking for some help on how to get started. I was having trouble building from source on my Fedora system, so I decided to deconstruct the SRPM for VTE provided by Fedora and use the rpm tools to rebuild from there after making changes. So far so good. I'm configuring with --enable-debug and using the vte test app to begin debugging. I have a few questions:

1) When I fire up gdb for the vte test app it seems not all debugging symbols are there. If I list all the functions beginning with vte_terminal_set* for example, I see some functions but not vte_terminal_set_size. Does anyone know why this would be? It actually worked once (the first time) for unknown reasons but it hasn't worked then and I'm not sure what has changed.
2) The debug messages seem to be going to stderr but VTE forks when it starts and I see nothing on the stderr of the console I launched it from. Is there something I am missing here? If I write using g_print() I can see messages but I'm wondering where all the _vte_debug_print() messages are going. This problem isn't such a big deal since I can still debug in some way but I was curious.

Finally, if anyone here is very familiar with the code and wants to point me in the right direction for the specific feature I'm hoping to work on, that would be great. Otherwise once I get a debugging environment working I will likely just start from  vte_terminal_set_size() and go from there.


Best,
Benjamin