#1103347 Does not accept -name command line option

Package:
alacritty
Source:
alacritty
Description:
Fast, cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator
Submitter:
martin f krafft
Date:
2025-04-16 19:09:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
#1103347#3
Date:
2025-04-16 15:09:02 UTC
From:
To:
Unfortunately, Alacritty does not accept the `-name` command-line
option, and instead spews and error message. This is a problem when
it is used as a drop-in to `x-terminal-emulator`, which sometimes
gets passed the `-name` option (supported by every other terminal
emulator that I know).

```
albatross:~% x-terminal-emulator -name foo                                      #(pts/33) 16 17:06:53.105
error: unexpected argument '-n' found

Usage: x-terminal-emulator [OPTIONS] [COMMAND]

For more information, try '--help'.
```

It would be good enough IMHO to accept and ignore it. Unfortunately,
upstream simply closed the issue wontfix without an explanation:
https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty/issues/8548

#1103347#8
Date:
2025-04-16 19:05:29 UTC
From:
To:
Control: severity -1 wishlist

Just checking the other terminals I have installed, kitty and
gnome-terminal also do not support this option. Although gnome-terminal
added a wrapper to align with x-terminal-emulator's requirements and
included support for a few "non-standard options", "-name" being one of
them.

For what it's worth, there's no expectation that x-terminal-emulator
supports this option. The only requirements are documented in Policy
11.8.3:

I did work with upstream to get -T supported before having it provide
the x-terminal-emulator alternative, but they already had support for
--title so it was just aliasing the existing option.

Anything passing "-name" to x-terminal-emulator is expecting more than
the abstraction guarantees. I'm not sure that's something that's worth
supporting.

Cheers,