[Portland] Bug#574131: xdg-utils: xdg-email never launchs a mua if desktop is not gnome neither kde neither xfce

[Jonathan Nieder]

Jan Braun wrote:

> Also, in the current proposal, the argument list of $MAILER necessarily
> starts with "mailto:". If the programs being put in MAILER check that
> and fail on unrecognized arguments, we have a way to introduce, up- and
> downward-compatibly
[...]

Ok, I'm convinced.

Still in an ideal world there would be a separate XMAILER and MAILER
but, well, we're not in an ideal world. :)

> *) My approach prefers XDG_MAILER over the desktop environment's idea of
>    a mailer. I feel that's the proper priority and important to get right.

Yes.

> *) Quoting, see above.

There are two precedents to compare.  BROWSER does some wacko thing
(actually, I never understood it and I fear different programs
have different behavior with shell metacharacters).  iirc EDITOR and
VISUAL traditionally are passed to the shell somewhat like this:

 sh -c "$EDITOR \"\$1\"" - filename

or within a shell:

 set -- filename
 eval "$EDITOR" '"$1"'

I wouldn't mind just forbidding shell metacharacters[*] if you prefer
that.

[*] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V3_chap02.html#tag_18_02