bug#18986: Design bug in browse-url.el: browse-url-can-use-xdg-open's logic uses overly strict assumption

[Jan D.]

Hello.

It used to be that xdg-open just called the desktop version, i.e. gnome-open, 
kde-open and so on.  It is not sufficient that xdg-open exists for the most 
part.  We can't cater for every window manager out there, we have to go by the 
majority.  If you can make xdg-open work, then making Emacs use it should be 
easy.

        Jan D.

> 7 nov 2014 kl. 12:04 skrev Florian v. Savigny <florian@fsavigny.de>:
> 
> 
> 
> Dear maintainers/authors,
> 
> browse-url-can-use-xdg-open returns t only if emacs is running under one of 
> the desktop environments, i.e. Gnome, KDE, Xfce4 or LXDE.
> 
> I do not know the deeper reasons for this, but from experience, I can confirm 
> that this running under a desktop environment may be sufficient, but is not 
> necessary: My emacs is running under fvwm, and xdg-open works fine. (You have 
> to know how to configure it, but that is no dark magic either; I do it via 
> ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list.)
> 
> My guess is that it would be sufficient to check for the existence of the 
> xdg-open binary. The condition of one of the desktop environments being run 
> is somewhat annoying, because when not fulfilled, it causes 
> browse-url-default-browser, which is often employed to open a URL, to default 
> to mozilla (or whatever follows in its hardcoded list), which may not be 
> exactly what you want. Effectively, it makes it impossible to specify your 
> favourite browser without some kludgy hack.
> 
> I have included some of the information produced by M-x report-emacs-bug, but 
> since I am fairly certain that most of it is irrelevant, I have left it out:
> 
> 
> In GNU Emacs 24.4.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.3)
> of 2014-10-21 on bitzer.hoetzel.info
> Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11601000
> Configured using:
> `configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --libexecdir=/usr/lib
> --localstatedir=/var --with-x-toolkit=gtk3 --with-xft
> 'CFLAGS=-march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe
> -fstack-protector-strong --param=ssp-buffer-size=4'
> CPPFLAGS=-D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=2
> LDFLAGS=-Wl,-O1,--sort-common,--as-needed,-z,relro'
> 
> Important settings:
>  value of $LANG: de_DE.ISO-8859-1
>  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1-unix
> 
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Florian v. Savigny
> 
> 
> 
>