(debian-policy.info)Packages providing a terminal emulator

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11.8.3 Packages providing a terminal emulator
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Packages that provide a terminal emulator for the X Window System which
meet the criteria listed below should declare in their ‘Provides’
control field that they provide the virtual package
‘x-terminal-emulator’.  They should also register themselves as an
alternative for ‘/usr/bin/x-terminal-emulator’, with a priority of 20.
That alternative should have a slave alternative for
‘/usr/share/man/man1/x-terminal-emulator.1.gz’ pointing to the
corresponding manual page.

To be an ‘x-terminal-emulator’, a program must:

   - Be able to emulate a DEC VT100 terminal, or a compatible terminal.

   - Support the command-line option ‘-e command’, which creates a new
     terminal window (1) and runs the specified command.  <command> may
     be multiple arguments, which form the argument list to the executed
     program.  In other words, the behavior is as though the arguments
     were passed directly to ‘execvp’, bypassing the shell.  (‘xterm’’s
     behavior of falling back on using the shell if ‘-e’ had a single
     argument and exec failed is permissible but not required.)

   - Support the command-line option ‘-T title’, which creates a new
     terminal window with the window title title.

   ---------- Footnotes ----------

   (1) “New terminal window” does not necessarily mean a new top-level X
window directly parented by the window manager; it could, if the
terminal emulator application were so coded, be a new “view” in a
multiple-document interface (MDI).