Using xdg-utils instead of htmlview, other hardwired apps
Ville Skyttä
ville.skytta at iki.fi
Mon Oct 1 18:41:57 UTC 2007
Hello,
I went through current devel packages that use htmlview or have unnecessarily
hardwired dependencies to firefox or evince. Most of these should be using
xdg-open from xdg-utils instead. Not hardcoding firefox as the browser and
evince as the PDF viewer should be trivial to understand, but why use
xdg-open instead of htmlview? xdg-utils/xdg-open compared to htmlview:
- Works better in non-GNOME setups
- Is a more standard implementation (more likely to be adopted upstream)
- Understands the $BROWSER environment variable
- Has slightly smaller dependency chain
So far, the only drawback of xdg-open compared to htmlview I've found is that
there doesn't seem to be real support for just opening a browser without an
URL to show in it. "xdg-open about:blank" is one hacky workaround for this,
but I don't know how portable it is accross browsers (works at least in
Firefox and friends, and Konqueror).
List of packages follows, I'd appreciate if their maintainers could have a
look and apply where appropriate. Most of these changes have been made
without testing but then again, most of them are so trivial that no testing
is required, but keep the above paragraph in mind if your package just needs
to open a browser without showing anything in particular in it (IIRC icewm is
one such case). For some packages I have patches available, some have
already been reported in Bugzilla, and some already applied in bleeding edge
upstream versions.
Patches available at http://scop.fedorapeople.org/patches/xdg-utils/ :
- amsn
- ddd
- fvwm
- gmrun
- gnome-libs
- grace
- grisbi
- icewm
- ipe
- keepassx
- R
- streamtuner
- system-config-date
- system-config-nfs
- system-config-samba
- system-config-services
- system-config-users
- tcldebugger
- xarchiver
Reported in Bugzilla:
- licq, #314231
- pinfo, #312471
- xfig, #313321
- xpdf, #313311
Already reported and applied in upstream devel versions, Fedora
packages should be adjusted to Require/BuildRequire xdg-utils instead
of htmlview when those are out:
- fontforge
- wireshark-gnome
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