Re: gnome-terminal

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> On 10 Oct 2001, Owen Taylor wrote:
> > I don't see any real reason why adding accessibility hooks to the
> > XTerm code is harder than adding them to gnome-terminal.  Yes, you
> > might need some extra indirection to avoid having the core code depend
> > on ATK, but I doubt the "accessible terminal" interface is that huge.
> 
>         I'm no expert on any of this but I think you could express many
> objections to using the xterm code;
> 
>         - co-ordinating with the xterm people / synching release cycles.
>         - getting patches committed to xterm
>         - getting the XFree86 xterm library on every platform we support,
>           or, getting a copy of the xterm source inside gnome-terminal
>         - the neccessity to further abstract the accessibility code, so
>           xterm doesn't depend on Atk.
> 
>         I think the alternative; of using libzvt HEAD and gnome-terminal
> from gnome-core HEAD has the following advantages:
> 
>         - no need to coordinate with anyone
>         - no patch approval really neccessary
>         - ships on every platform with no effort
>         - depends on Atk already.

Well, the basic problem (no offense intended to anyone who has worked
on zvt) is that libzvt doesn't work, has code that is not really
fixable, and there is nobody out there who is going to spend
large amounts of time trying to fix it.

Yes, gnome-terminal mostly "works" - I after all do use it. But it
doesn't come remotely close to passing the xterm test program, it
doesn't have working i18n support - either for UTF-8 or for multibyte
encodings; we aren't at any way addressing the many bugs of
the form of gnome-terminal crashes/misbehaves when running
FooWrite on VMS.

And I don't see any of these things being fixed with the current
code base. The current code just doesn't have any sort of
feel of "here's how a terminal works and this is that implements
it". It's just code that happens to do the right thing most
of the time. (At least if you are using English)

Thomas Dickey has done a very good job for xterm of defining the
expected behavior and then making sure xterm implements it.
And other people working on Xterm are doing the same thing for
extensions for i18n, for right-to-left text etc.

For GNOME-2.0, I don't see an alternative to fixing up libzvt as
best, porting to GTK+-2.0, and maybe hacking in some accessibility
support if that is easy. The timescale is too short, and anything
else is a major project. We'll just have to keep telling people
to use xterm when gnome-terminal misbehaves.

But long term, we either need to rewrite, carefully this time,
or we need to take advantage of an existing maintained code
base.

Regards,
                                        Owen