[Impact]
Due to a regression in vte2.91 0.44.0, reverse search was broken in various terminals like mate-terminal (GTK+3 build) or gnome-terminal. Searching with Ctrl-Shift-G could show you a result or two in the currently visible part of terminal log, but further searching (with scrolling the terminal upwards) stopped working completely.
This wasn't fixed in version 0.44.2, so 0.44.2-1ubuntu2 in Ubuntu 16.10 still has this bug. The fix was recently applied upstream, and it would be good to have it backported to 16.10.
The debdiff with the fix is in the attachment below.
[Test Case]
1. Have Ubuntu 16.10 and mate-terminal or gnome-terminal.
2. Have a lot of text in your terminal window, enough to make the vertical scrollbar show. For example, you can build some package which is built with autotools. You'll get lots of occurrences of the same word, like 'make' or 'installing'.
3. Try searching for some word with reverse search.
[Regression Potential]
The code change in the patch only affects the search functionality, and that was already broken so you can't break it more. I've tested both forward and reverse search with the patch, and they both work fine now. I consider the regression risk to be quite low here.
The attachment "this patch fixes reverse search in terminal apps" seems to be a debdiff. The ubuntu-sponsors team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review and hopefully sponsor the debdiff. If the attachment isn't a patch, please remove the "patch" flag from the attachment, remove the "patch" tag, and if you are member of the ~ubuntu-sponsors, unsubscribe the team.
[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by ~brian-murray, for any issue please contact him.]