Comment 23 for bug 1297051

The response to \e[>c should contain the version number. Well, in case of xterm it contains that. Now, some emulators (e.g. vte) put their own version number there, while some others (e.g. konsole) put the version of xterm it claims to be compatible with.

Imagine there'd be a brand new escape sequence, to which the response should (according to the specification) be the name of the terminal emulator and the version number (e.g. "xterm-310", "konsole-2.14" etc.). And some pieces of software begin to depend on this (if no software depended on this then what would be the point?).

Now a new terminal emulator (let's call it "asdf") comes along and figures out that certain apps just don't work there because they're aware of xterm and konsole, but not of asdf. So they decide for practical reasons to go against the standard and report "xterm-310" instead of "asdf-0.1" because they're compatible with xterm-310 (who knows, maybe even with newer releases, maybe not), and they want that certain app to work. But "asdf-0.2" also adds a cool new feature that xterm doesn't have. What to do then, how to advertise it? Shall they report "xterm-310 (er, no, wait, actually asdf-0.2)"? Where will this end?

Could this be made any simpler than the complete nightmare with browser User-Agent strings? Is it worth starting at all?

I don't know and I'm not the one to make a decision. If xterm comes up with something that looks promising, I'll port that to gnome-terminal. That's all I can do, apart for speaking up against solutions that I don't see viable.

Given that so far you're the only one I'm aware requesting this feature, I'd say that the simplest is if you solve it your way for yourself, by patching vte, or relying on the version number being 3600-ish, and try to solve your problem without relying on answerback - plenty of other people managed to do this.