Comment 3 for bug 1261619

Yes, please do upgrade! There's been many changes-fixes-improvements to gnome-terminal. If you don't upgrade, Trusty LTS's default terminal emulator will lag behind by 3 major Gnome releases, this just doesn't sound right.

Vte ships the /etc/profile.d/vte.sh script, to be sourced by bash/zsh. Once it's done, opening a new tab keeps the directory as it did previously. I don't see why it'd take more than ten minutes to get this working distro-wide. (For myself, I just had to add a "source /etc/profile.d/vte.sh" line to my ~/.bashrc, that's all.)

Even if you choose to "just do the upgrade as Debian did and take the heat", that "heat" would be asking users who complain to add something to their .bashrc, probably much simpler/better than asking them to upgrade gnome-terminal.

It's likely that Vte will be upgraded to 0.36 (as shipped by Gnome 3.12) for Trusty, since this version contains plenty of important bugfixes and improvements over the currently shipped 0.34. A new feature of vte-0.36 is rewrapping lines on resize. There's a corresponding gnome-terminal setting to disable this, this is necessary because a giant (or infinite) scrollback makes resizing very slow, so users should be able to decide if it's worth the price for them. If gnome-terminal is not updated, at least this config option will have to be backported. And it's probably already more hassle than just updating and doing that vte.sh thingy.