gnome-terminal no longer provides an option to make the background
transparent. Other distributions(Fedore, Arch) carry a patch to still
provide this option. Debian should add this patch too.

attached is a patch against
svn://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-gnome/desktop/unstable/gnome-terminal to
add the patch from Fedora:

http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/gnome-terminal.git/plain/0001-Restore-transparency-gnome-3-14.patch

Hi !

I think Debian should consider carefully the implications of adding
this patch.

Zerothly, there is no need for a patch; gnome-terminal supports
transparency just fine. See the instructions in the FAQ at [1]. These
instructions in fact can be adapted to any window of any programme
the user wants to make transparent, not just gnome-terminal.

Firstly, this patch will *never* be accepted upstream; therefore
adding it will impose on Debian the maintenance burden to keep it
working when the upstream code changes.

Secondly, it relies on an undocumented feature of vte to enable the
transparency. In the event that a future vte release removes this
feature, this will mean that Debian will also need to carry and
maintain a patch to vte.

Thirdly, the actual patch presented here has several defects, chiefly
the problem that it always forces an ARGB visual even when no
transparency is in use. This may negatively impact performance and
memory use.

Fourthly, the patch adds user-visible strings, but does not contain
their translation in any of the languages that gnome-terminal ships
translations for. So they  will need to be translated by Debian l10n
teams, adding to the maintenance burden.

Finally, there are many other terminal emulators that do support
transparency (e.g., KDE's konsole); so if they want transparency, the
user can simply choose to use one of them instead of gnome-terminal.

In conclusion, it is my opinion that Debian should *not* add this patch
to its gnome-terminal package.

Regards,
	Christian

	[upstream gnome-terminal maintainer]


[1]
https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Terminal/FAQ#How_can_I_make_the_terminal_transparent.3F

Hi;

as an addendum: While the OP claims that the patch is already more
widely used than just its originator (Fedora):

this does not in fact seem to be the case.

As far as I could find out, Arch does not in fact carry this patch. The
up-to-date main gnome-terminal package [1] appears not to use it. There
only is an extra (outdated) 'gnome-terminal-transparent' package [2] on
AUR that contains some version of the patch.

Regards,
	Christian

[1] https://www.archlinux.org/packages/testing/x86_64/gnome-terminal/
[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gnome-terminal-transparent/

Thanks for your thoughts, Christian.

I don't know about others in the team, but I have no intention to ship this patch.

Also when we switch to Wayland, transparency will be a given as it is
implemented in the compositor and is very easy to set (at least in weston, I
haven't tried gnome-shell/wayland yet but I guess they'll add a keybinding too).

Regards,
Emilio

It's not the same.  With the given patch, you get a translucent
background, but all other colors remain opaque.  With a WM/compositing
approach even the foreground colors, non-default background colors,
and the UI chrome (menubar, tabs, WM title bar) become transparent.
It's really not the same user experience.  Especially with the
foreground text becoming translucent, the result is in my opinion less
usable than with the explicit transparency patch.

Why not at least document the vte feature and committing to keeping
that, for the benefit of other vte-based apps?

Someone somewhere (can't remember who and where, sorry) pointed out
that quite a few other apps already always force ARGB without
problems.  As far as I remember, they pointed out that ARGB used to
have problems but it's not the case anymore.  Yet, if it's still an
issue, the patch should be further improved to handle this.

I myself have used g-t with this patch for about half a year now, and
F20/Rawhide also ships this.  I haven't found any reports yet that are
likely connected to transparency.

What are the other defects?

Isn't it one more reason for accepting the feature mainstream (maybe
behind a disabled-by-default configure flag)?  Translations would
appear at almost zero cost.

I have recently put tons of effort in improving gnome-terminal,
probably most significantly the rewrap-on-resize feature makes it
significantly better for me than most other terminals.  I'd hate to
tell our users "go use another terminal", that's not why I put so much
work in it.  I'd prefer my work to reach as many users as possible,
even those who insist on transparency.

I'm not sure about Ubuntu's branches and stuff, but looking at
https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-terminal/ubuntu and
https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/ubuntu/gnome3-staging
suggests to me that probably the patch is going to be included in
Vivid.

I don't think I have a conclusion here :)  I think the best would be
if mainstream g-t accepted this feature, I can't see why ChPe is so
resistant, but he made it clear that the feature won't become
mainstream.  I'm not sure if all major distros shipping the patch and
pushing for adoption could make him change his mind.  Given this
situation, Debian should listen to its users, understand the pros/cons
of applying this patch and make whatever seems to be the best
decision.

cheers,
egmont

Fyi: The transparency patch indeed did appear in Ubuntu Vivid.

Hi,

As buxy noted in upstream's bug, Ubuntu has been and is still applying the
patch:
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-terminal/ubuntu/view/head:/debian/patches/0001-Restore-transparency.patch

They've been carrying it since 3.12 (vivid).

I'm not sure why this bug is tagged fixed-upstream.  It doesn't seem to be
fixed upstream at all

Can we please apply this in Debian as well?

Thanks!