Need some help working on gnome-terminal

[Paul Johnson <pauljohn ku edu>]

I don't find a developer list for gnome-terminal, so I am asking about 
at random on this one.

I have been an Eterm user and like its background image features, but 
its support for utf8 is slow in coming and so I want to make 
gnome-terminal my preferred application. In order to make this dream 
come true, I want to hack gnome terminal to

1. Accept a pixmap name from the command line (work is done on that)
2. Accept color shading/masking commands from command line (work 
partially done on that)
3. Make background pixmaps resize themselves to automatically fill up 
background of terminal when it is resized (I'm totally blocked on this one).

The idea here is that I have about 3000 backgrounds saved in a 
directory, and a Perl script that chooses one and then runs the terminal 
with a background and shading.

I've got the source code of gnome terminal and vte and I've dug through 
here a lot, and the big problem seems to be that the part of the code 
that sets the background for a terminal object does not know the size of 
the working window.  The current approach is to fill up the pixbuf 
background with a fixed size and then show portions of that depending on 
how big the window is.

I found the background code that makes the tiled version of small 
pixmaps when is then put to a buffer and it is in turn scaled to fill up 
the background, and I can fiddle that code to make a background fill up 
any desired terminal size. However, I can't figure how to make the size 
of the image re-adjust when the terminal gets resized.

If you have advice, I would be glad to hear it.
--
Paul E. Johnson                       email: pauljohn ku edu
Dept. of Political Science            http://lark.cc.ku.edu/~pauljohn
1541 Lilac Lane, Rm 504
University of Kansas                  Office: (785) 864-9086
Lawrence, Kansas 66044-3177           FAX: (785) 864-5700