Re: VTE

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com> writes: 
> We cannot switch to vte by default until vte's accessibility support is
> complete and thoroughly verified.  The accessibility support for zvt is
> extensive and verified, and at this time we do not have resources to do
> this verification for vte.  

I don't agree, because the Zvt i18n and terminal emulation and
redrawing and fonts and on and on are thoroughly verified to be
totally broken. Plus we have good verification that Zvt is
unmaintained and has been for years.

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.

Fixing accessibility for VTE is clearly way, way, way, way easier than
fixing Zvt's numerous problems. Accessibility is useless on an app
that does not work to begin with.


Keeping the terminal in its current broken state is not acceptable. We
have to fix the i18n. We have to have working accessibility. This
means resource investment. The only sane solution is the one that
means less _total_ resource investment to get everything fixed.


If you need an accessibility-related rationale, the "use system font"
feature is busted, and will remain so until we get the terminal on the
fontconfig/Pango font infrastructure.

Havoc