[thunderbird] Default browser is no longer read from prefs

[Christopher Aillon]

On 04/13/2011 04:01 AM, Steve Clark wrote:
> On 04/13/2011 03:26 AM, Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> On 04/12/2011 06:40 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> On 04/13/2011 06:47 AM, Christopher Aillon wrote:
>>>> commit 7986a8567a9dbb2a6f8187b91a021d5ad350f96f
>>>> Author: Christopher Aillon<caillon at redhat.com>
>>>> Date: Tue Apr 12 18:15:07 2011 -0700
>>>>
>>>> Default browser is no longer read from prefs
>>>>
>>>> It's read from the system. Too bad that means GConf for now...
>>>>
>>>> This means the open browser script isn't used either, so kill that.
>>>
>>> This should go into the desktop beat for the release notes along with
>>> the gconf key needed.
>>
>> No. This has been the case since Fedora 11, actually. It just didn't
>> matter since gconf was where the defaults were kept anyway, and
>> gnome-default-application-preferences set the gconf keys, and it never
>> got cleaned out.
>>
>> Now, we're setting _gsettings_ keys in control center, so those gconf
>> keys aren't getting updated when the user toggles that. But it doesn't
>> matter. I pushed an update to the default gconf values to launch
>> gvfs-open as the default browser which will read the values out of
>> gsettings.
>>
>> This should all be transparent to the user, no need to document stuff
>> that just works.


> I think that is the wrong attitude! Because at some point it is going to
> break
> and the poor enduser is going to have no idea why. This is the Microsoft
> attitude.

Wow.  Talk about the wrong attitude, making random sensationalist 
accusations ...


Removing the preference is in itself not a functional change that I feel 
warrants documentation, especially since I don't think we had 
documentation telling people to use the preferences in the past.

Thunderbird has not used this preference for over 2 years, going back to 
F11 beta.  Thunderbird has been using GConf for those same 2 years. 
Removing our setting of these prefs does absolutely nothing.  It would 
be the exact same thing as if I removed an #if 0 block of code.  I would 
also say we should not document that.



What did change is something entirely different and unrelated to this 
commit: we're now using GSettings instead of GConf for everything in the 
desktop.  The switch to GSettings is already covered elsewhere in 
documentation.

Anything that reads from GConf needs to switch to GSettings and will 
have some things not function properly until they do.  That includes 
Thunderbird, XChat, Pidgin, among others.

These GConf things that will break include things such as the network 
proxy settings, whether or not accessibility is enabled, and the default 
web browser application.

The default web browser is easy to take care of though, since the end 
goal is to launch a program.  Instead of having gconf launch a default 
browser, it will launch an program which reads the correct default out 
of GSettings, and then launch that.  I already made that change.  So 
this specific one probably doesn't need documentation.

Other things about GConf <-> GSettings probably needs documentation, 
which I believe should already be known/handled, but again, I do not 
feel that the specific commit that Rahul referenced does.