[paisawalla]

"It will run just on just about any terminal on any OS" is an extremely tall claim and requires more than stating what's easy to imagine, in order to back it up. Xterm is not some kind of universal standard, it's a constructive definition.

I have a difficult time imagining what a test suite looks like that can exercise all the relevant test cases in, and correctly evaluate the output of, terminal emulators across all OSes. So to me, this statement probably means "we tried a few sample scripts in VMware at some point."

[throwanem]

I'd probably try to do it with some kind of dummy framebuffer I could capture to an image file, and then inspect that image for variance against a known good snapshot. It's an approach I've seen work well with mobile app e2e testing; I grant it's heavyweight and can be somewhat imprecise, but I can't think offhand what could be much lighter and still work as well.

To be clear, I realize I'm asking a good deal here, but I'm being asked a good deal here too. If I'm to consider building a production application on this or any platform, I need considerable confidence that that platform isn't flawed in ways that may prove to mean I'll have wasted what might be a great deal of work. And if I'm going to have to design against the assumption I may need to have the application still work even when the platform doesn't, why use that platform at all?