Subject: Re: Thunderbird and Firefox
To: Mark Davies <mark@mcs.vuw.ac.nz>
From: David Brownlee <abs@NetBSD.org>
List: pkgsrc-users
Date: 11/04/2007 21:12:30
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...
--
David/absolute -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --