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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