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

[Per Olofsson]

Hi,

2010-10-23 02:47, Jan Braun skrev:
> [ wildly merged quotes from 3 mails. I hope you don't mind.]

Not at all :-)

> 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:

Actually, I found out that mutt supports mailto: links without that script.

>> 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
...

OK.

>> 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. ;)

Right :-)

>> 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.

Makes sense. It's different from how xdg-open handles $BROWSER, but
maybe that's not a problem.

> 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?

Yes, I suppose so.

-- 
Pelle