Spec to define the default terminal?

[Vladimir Kudrya]

So now xdg-termial is a collection of workarouds to tie different DE's 
approaches together. Just like xdg-open.
IMHO, there should be a movement towards proper standards.

@Simon, with your remarks taken into accout, here is an update:
Using desktop entries to define terminals gives advantages to downstream 
tools (selector GUIs, etc.) by providing proper descriptions, l10n.
Places to look could be extended beyond /usr, into a proper 
${XDG_DATA_[HOME|DIRS]} hierarchy, so it would look like this:

Terminal descriptios:
~/.local/share/xdg-terminals ($XDG_DATA_HOME)
{/usr/local/share,/usr/share}/xdg-terminals ($XDG_DATA_DIRS)

Configs:
~/.config/$desktop-xdg-terminals.list ($XDG_CONFIG_HOME)
~/.config/xdg-terminals.list
/etc/xdg/$desktop-xdg-terminals.list ($XDG_CONFIG_DIRS)
/etc/xdg/xdg-terminals.list

If this logic would be embeded into xdg-terminal, that would be a great 
start.

2017-05-25 09:16, Simon Lees wrote:
> We already have the xdg-terminal binary which launches the terminal
> based off the currently running desktop. I think a better approach would
> be to integrate with that existing infrastructure, it could be modified
> for example to check for the existence of a config file in 1 maybe
> several dirs (I guess a sysadmin may want to configure a default
> terminal for all his users).
>
> That config file would contain the path to the terminal followed by the
> exec command. This approach is less secure as someone could modify the
> config file without you realising (I guess this could happen anyway).
>
> I don't like the idea of describing exec arguments only somewhere in
> /usr, it would mean that if I was working on a machine that I didn't
> have root access to and I wanted to use some less popular or new
> terminal that hadn't been added to the list yet I wouldn't be able to. I
> also wouldn't be able to use a terminal that I had built from source in
> my home dir and added to my path.
>
> I also think in the days of the X11 / wayland transition prefixing the
> config files with xdg- rather then x- is a better approach, I may be on
> my own with that though.
>
> Cheers
>