Re: Thunderbird and Firefox

[Mark Davies <mark%mcs.vuw.ac.nz@localhost>]

On Friday 02 November 2007 23:22:23 David Brownlee wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > Right -- this is a problem.  Unfortunately, the Thunderbird folks
> > haven't exposed this in their GUI.  We certainly should not do
> > that via our patches.  We thus have several choices:
> >
> >     Do nothing.  Anyone who wants clicking on links to work has to
> >     hand-edit something, per-user or (I assume) per-site.
> >
> >     Make the proposed change.  Anyone who wants a different browser
> >     or no browser has to hand-edit something, as above.
> >
> >     Find some way -- the options framework? -- to let sites set
> >     their own default.
> >
> > I don't know how to do #3 in any rational form, though I'll defer
> > to those who know pkgsrc better comment further.  I do know that
> > interactive installs (i.e., where the person doing the
> > installation is prompted for an answer) is a non-starter.
>
>       Updated proposal:
>
>       - Add an option to thunderbird 'thunderbird-open-urls', which
> when enabled (by default) will cause thunderbird to default to
> opening clicked links in 'openurl'
>       - Add an openurl pkg_alternatives(8) wrapper which firefox and
>         other web browsers can provide
>
>       So, if a user installs the default thunderbird package,
>       and a web browser, clicking on a link in an email will open
>       the URL in the web browser. I think this is a critical
>       usability point. People building their own thunderbird
>       packages can disable the option, but we should not require
>       extra steps for the normal case of getting things to work.
>
>       Admins and users can use pkg_alternatives to set system
>       wide and their own openurl preferences respectively.

Note that there is some further effect when (possibly some bit of) 
gnome is installed.  thunderbird here does fire up a browser when you 
click on urls and firefox does fire up a mailer on mailto's and we 
don't set anything in prefs.js, rather they pay attention to settings 
in the gconf setup.

By default they fire up each other which is annoying here as our 
default environment is KDE and just because someone wants to use one 
of these doesn't necessarily mean they want to use the other so we 
override the defaults to be kmail and konqueror by creating an 
appropriate 
$PKG_SYSCONFBASE/gconf/gconf.mcs.defaults/desktop/gnome/url-handlers 
tree.  This then allows individual users to change their setting by 
running gnome-default-applications-properties and setting 
appropriately.  Also has the advantage applying to other apps that 
use the gconf settings.

Would be nice if changing the KDE preference settings could be made to 
(optionally) update the users gconf tree appropriately then our KDE 
users wouldn't need to know about 
gnome-default-applications-properties but anyway I think KDE 4 and 
gnome both using dbus might sort some of that out.

Anyway I don't know if setting the prefs.js values overrides the above 
(I suspect it would) but I wouldn't want any changes to the packages 
to break the above behaviour.

cheers
mark