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

[Jan Braun]

[ wildly merged quotes from 3 mails. I hope you don't mind.]

Per Olofsson schrob:
> Thanks. There's a problem though. xdg-email is meant specifically for
> GUI programs. That means there's no tty available in general. So you
> can't simply run mutt - you need to run it in a terminal window.

/usr/lib/mutt/mailto-mutt already does that (in addition to
parsing mailto: links). And it shouldn't be too hard to prevent it from
spawning an x-terminal-emulator if already in a terminal. In fact:

> I wonder if the X issue can be solved similarly to BROWSER. I'm not
> even sure how it's solved with BROWSER. What if the user doesn't want
> a graphical browser?

That's me! And I seem to have success with

| #!/bin/sh
| ELINKS=/some/where/elinks
| local L
| if L="`tput lines`" && [ "$L"0 -gt "1"0 ] ; then
|     exec $ELINKS "$@"
| else
|     exec x-terminal-emulator -e $ELINKS  "$@"
| fi

and pointing BROWSER to that. Still new and in trial, but so far works
for xdg-open in the linux console, in an x-terminal-emulator, and under
X outside of a terminal emulator. Opens an x-terminal-emulator exactly
in the last case. Should be probably factored into "run-in-terminal.sh"
and used as BROWSER='run-in-terminal.sh /some/where/elinks'

> There's also the question of the user setting for example MAILER=alpine.

She should set MAILER='run-in-terminal.sh alpine' instead. :)

> Then xdg-email will have to recognize that it's not an X app and also
> launch it in a terminal. How will it know that? I guess that doesn't
> work with BROWSER either at the moment.

Correct, xdg-email can't know if $MAILER is an X app. The user has to
supply that information, by not prefixing withrun-in-terminal.sh .
(Unless she knows she'll never use xdg-email from inside a native X
application, then she could guarantee alpine always has a terminal. Ha!
Not what you expected she'd do to your GUI-helper. ;)

> Thirdly, your patch always uses the MAILER variable if it's defined,
> even when running under a DE. I'm not sure that's the correct thing to do.

No problem, I am sure. :D
Having set the environment variable is an explicit statement of the form
"I demand mutt as my mua!". Using a DE, in contrast, is more along the
line of "I generally like what GNOME is doing", it's much less specific
about my email preferences.
And if we make xdg-email prefer the DE's idea over MAILER, I can't even
unset GNOME's email preferences, I have to explicitly configure GNOME to
use mutt. And I have to configure KDE to use mutt, if I occasionally use
KDE too, for whatever reason. And I have to re-configure MAILER, GNOME
and KDE if I decide to switch to mutt-ng.  Note I also can't configure
GNOME/KDE to use xdg-email, because that'd be a cycle.
If we make xdg-email prefer MAILER over the DE's idea, on the other
hand, I can still set MAILER to mutt. When I then use GNOME/KDE/XFCE, I
can, once, say "use xdg-email as a mailto handler", and everything will
follow MAILER around to mutt-ng, or alpine, or whatever. Alternatively,
I can set just KDE to stick with kmail(?), and it will. And, best of
all, if I don't care about that funky MAILER stuff for people who use
non-DE software or multiple DEs, I don't have to: it will never be set,
and never get in my way.

> > [1] Anyone know of a good documentation for BROWSER/EDITOR/VISUAL/PAGER?
> http://catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/

Thanks. And I guess that EDITOR/VISUAL/PAGER never supported X or the
colon-fallthough-scheme, but just assume they're running in a terminal?

> [MAILER and colon-fallthrough] We could simply copy the code that
> parses $BROWSER (it's in upstream but not the Debian package)

Nice, +1.

cheers,
    Jan
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