Re: Thunderbird and Firefox

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 3 Nov 2007, Mark Davies wrote:

> On Friday 02 November 2007 23:22:23 David Brownlee wrote:
> >         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.

        Hmm, the two obvious options to having it work out of the box
        would be:
        a) Set default values for url-handlers, potentially just firefox,
           or alternatively any web browser when installed could set
           it
        b) Set the url-handlers to use openurl and let pkg_alternatives
           drive which web browser is used if users want to adjust the
           default. That also makes it easy for KDE and non (KDE/gnome)
           apps to play...

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