On desktops without xterm, xdg-terminal's fallback for TERM="" simply fails
Submitted by Stephan Sokolow
Assigned to Portland Bugs
Description
Created attachment 55013 Patch for more robust fallback behaviour (apply after patches for bugs 44357 and 44358)
Some distros (eg. Lubuntu) don't install xterm by default. Furthermore, some users may prefer urxvt (rxvt-unicode) to xterm.
The current git HEAD (b961235b) for xdg-terminal.in simply fails under these circumstances.
I'm not sure what the best solution would be in this case but, for my tool which needed a working xdg-terminal right now, I borrowed the colon-separated list $BROWSER code from xdg-open.
I'm attaching a patch in case it's of use. It depends on my patches for bug 44357 and bug 44358 but, if there's interest, I can rework it to apply against whatever you prefer.
The behaviour I chose was to prefer urxvt over rxvt and rxvt over xterm on the assumption that, while xterm is often installed by default, rxvt and rxvt-unicode being present generally indicates an explicit preference for them on the user's part.
Patch 55013, "Patch for more robust fallback behaviour (apply after patches for bugs 44357 and 44358)":
more_robust_fallback_behaviour_for_xdg-terminal.patch