Classic confinement request: bossterm

[kmshivang]

• name: bossterm
• description: Modern terminal emulator built with Kotlin and Compose Desktop. Features include multiple tabs, search, hyperlink detection, full emoji/Unicode
  support, copy-on-select, IME support for CJK input, command completion notifications, and mouse reporting for vim/tmux/htop.
• snapcraft: BossTerm/snapcraft.yaml at master · kshivang/BossTerm · GitHub
• upstream: GitHub - kshivang/BossTerm: Pure Kotlin Terminal Emulator. Works with SSH and PTY.
• upstream-relation: I am the author and maintainer of BossTerm
• supported-category: terminal emulator
• reasoning:

BossTerm is a terminal emulator that requires classic confinement for the following technical reasons:

1. PTY (Pseudo-Terminal) Access
   Terminal emulators must create and manage PTY devices (/dev/ptmx, /dev/pts/*) to spawn shell processes. The pty4j library we use requires unrestricted PTY access to allocate and manage terminal sessions.

2. Arbitrary Command Execution
   As a terminal emulator, BossTerm must execute the user’s shell ($SHELL) and any commands they type. This is the core function of a terminal - running arbitrary
   processes with full environment inheritance.

3. Unrestricted File System Access
   Users expect to navigate to any directory (cd /path), read/write files anywhere they have permissions, and run programs from any location. A terminal cannot be
   restricted to specific paths.

4. Process Control & Signals
   Terminal emulators must send signals (SIGINT, SIGTSTP, SIGCONT, SIGWINCH) to child processes and manage foreground/background job control.

5. Precedent
   Other terminal emulators have been granted classic confinement:

• alacritty
• hyper
• tilix
• terminator

The existing interfaces (process-control, system-files, etc.) are insufficient because:

• No interface combination allows spawning arbitrary user shells
• PTY allocation requires unrestricted /dev/ptmx access
• Users expect full file system navigation capability

I understand that strict confinement is generally preferred over classic.

I’ve tried the existing interfaces to make the snap work under strict confinement.

I attempted to use combinations of process-control, home, removable-media, and system-files interfaces, but terminal emulators fundamentally require the ability to
spawn any process the user requests and access any path they navigate to, which is not achievable with strict confinement.

[kmshivang]

Hello Snapcraft community, this is my first snapcraft release, I created high performant modern terminal, that has features like iterm, is optimized for claude code, codex, like TUI apps. Please let give it a shot, and let me know if I need to clarify anything, thank you!

[jslarraz]

Hey @kmshivang

It is plausible that there are technical reasons why bossterm needs classic to work properly in all scenarios, but please note that classic confinement is a sensitive matter and it is reserved for mature, well-known applications published by mature, well-known entities. As of today, I believe that bossterm doesn’t meet this criteria because of the following reasons:

• The project seems to be very fresh, according to the upstream repository

• The projects seems to have little/none community around according to upstream repository (contributors, issues, PRs, etc.)

• I could not find evidences that the project has a strong enough user base currently

Thus, considering these factors, I think bossterm should not get classic confinement as of now.