[Portland-bugs] [Bug 15185] New: xdg-open BROWSER usage is back-to-front ( if defined && in DE then DE takes precedence instead of env taking precedence )

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15185

           Summary: xdg-open BROWSER usage is back-to-front ( if defined &&
                    in DE then DE takes precedence instead of env taking
                    precedence )
           Product: Portland
           Version: beta2
          Platform: x86 (IA32)
        OS/Version: Linux (All)
            Status: NEW
          Severity: minor
          Priority: medium
         Component: xdg-utils
        AssignedTo: portland-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: kentfredric at gmail.com


Generally, if one manually sets an ENV variable in their profile, one wants it
to be abided by. 

This became notable to my attention when PSI( psi-im.org ) stopped providing a
manual browser selection as it deemed xdg-open suitable for opening links. 

But lo and behold, for us poor kde users, that means using anything other than
konqueror as the default web-browser in KDE = an exercise in Xdg-open being
useless. 

when xdg-open detects you are using KDE, it will just use kfmclient to handle
urls, regardless of the ENV variable BROWSER. 

When this is something other than a KDE application, kfmclient downloads the
given URL into /tmp, and then calls whatever browser you set with konqueror to
open that now local file ( and potentially rising to a local-machine exploit
risk ) 

My friend and I, experienced the same problem and had the same agreeance on how
it should be best handled, and it appeared more practical to us that xdg-open
honour any manually set BROWSER string regardless of desktop environment, and
only fall back to the desktop environment handling in the event no $BROWSER
value was set ( noting of course, the desktop environment can set this itself,
but it is still able to be overridden on a scope level instead of it having to
propagate system wide )

While this would add some inconsistency as to how kde vs xdg-open oriented
clients would function, it appears setting $BROWSER is not done normally anyway
so it can be interpreted as an 'i know what this does' option. 

I have manually altered my own bash script to replace this :
-------------------------------
if [ x"$DE" = x"" ]; then
    # if BROWSER variable is not set, check some well known browsers instead
    if [ x"$BROWSER" = x"" ]; then
        BROWSER=firefox:mozilla:netscape
    fi
    DE=generic
fi
---------------------------------
with this:
---------------------------------
if [ x"$BROWSER" = x"" ]; then
   if [ x"$DE" = x"" ]; then
      BROWSER=firefox:mozilla:netscape;
      DE=generic;
   fi;
else
   DE=generic;
fi
---------------------------------

and it 'works for me' and behaves how i expect it to. 

xdg-open http://www.google.com     #==> google.com in konqueror
BROWSER="firefox"  xdg-open http://www.google.com   #==> google.com in firefox
without stupid kfmclient downloading the file. 

I was tempted of the idea of trying to work out what application was calling
xdg-open and load config info from a ~/.whatever file and load browsers based
on calling application when chosen, but heh, just an idea :)

( for what its worth, on gentoo using  x11-misc/xdg-utils-1.0.2-r1 )


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