[Portland] Re: xdg-email & xdg-open

[Benjamin Meyer]

On Tuesday 14 November 2006 00:01, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> Hi Waldo,
>
> On Monday 13 November 2006 23:01, Bastian, Waldo wrote:
> > I was wondering what to do with xdg-email and xdg-open. For a number of
> > reasons it seems likely that xdg-open will be used for mailto: urls as
> > much as xdg-email. Perhaps some of the xdg-email functionality should be
> > moved to xdg-utils-common so that xdg-open and xdg-email can share the
> > same implementation / work arounds.
>
> My first reaction was to call xdg-email from xdg-open when the passed URI
> is a mailto
>
> However, basically all code paths beside KDE are equal, once xdg-email has
> created the final mailto URI
>
> Example
> $ xdg-email mailto:kevin.krammer at gmx.at
> in a GNOME, XFCE or unknown environment will be equal to
> $ xdg-open mailto:kevin.krammer at gmx.at
>
> So we could do this:
> in xdg-open: change the KDE code path to check for mailto and call the
> kmailservice instead of kfmclient exec.
> (Whatever we do for the other problem, we should probably do this anyway)
>
> in xdg-email: when getting an mailto, delegate it to xdg-open
> xdg-email would then be a formatter for mailto URIs
>
> This is a small change in behavior, because right now one can do
>
> $ xdg-email --cc foo at example.com mailto:bar at example.com?subject=test
>
> > Very much related to this is what to do with attachment handling.
> > Mozilla Thunderbird doesn't allow to specify attachments at all at the
> > moment because allowing that from a mailto URL is considered a security
> > risk. It would make sense to alllow this for explicitly specified
> > attachments as currently possible with xdg-email, but xdg-open shouldn't
> > allow one to specify attachments.
>
> Hmm, I think we will need to pass it as a mailto URI when detecting one of
> the DEs.
> Otherwise we would need to query, if at all possible, the DE's settings,
> check if the configured client is known to need a workaround, and call them
> according to this workaround.
>
> Additonal to having to retrieve, understand and parse the DE's settings,
> the keeping ofapplication specific workarounds up to date will be very time
> consuming and not backwards compatible in case the commandline handling
> changes.
>
> It's quite disappointing that Mozilla is imposing this "security" feature
> instead of letting the originator (browser, other application) decide
> whether it trusts the URI's parts :(
>
> However, since this seems to be so important to them, it is something
> between them and their users. Thunderbird user will not expect
> automatically supplied attachments to work and user of other mail clients
> are not affected.
>
> > The way that Qt uses xdg-open, even
> > for mailto URLs, is definittly going to be a problem here.
>
> Don't think this will be a problem. QDesktopServices seems to be scheme
> based, so they could just register xdg-email for mailto, maybe they have
> this configurable through qt-config?
>
> Cheers,
> Kevin

It isn't configurable, but it would not be a problem to change 
QDesktopServices to use xdg-email when the mailto scheme is used.

-Benjamin Meyer