Re: preferred app question



Hi Jack!

On Nov 12, 2014, at 11:10 AM, Jack wrote:
...
I'm replying to this ancient thread because this problem just happened again, and I want to record getting the solution someplace where others might be able to find it.

In my case, I'm running a KDE system on Gentoo, so I only have the absolutely minimally necessary gnome libraries installed. I do not use systemd, so I actually can't use any of the Gnome UI tools, such as Nautilus or Gnome-control-panel (or whatever the name really is.) Everything had been fine, while I was using Firefox as my primary browser, with several others also installed. However, I recently uninstalled firefox, and installed firefox-bin. (For those who don't know, Gentoo is a source based distro, but sometimes it's easier to install a pre-compiled version.) I suppose in order to allow one to have both firefox and firefox-bin installed at the same time, all references to those apps are different, so the -bin is not simply a drop-in replacement.

Symptom - when I right click on an html part in a message part list, firefox-bin was the first app listed. However, clicking on any URL within a message opened it in Opera. Right clicking on the link and selecting copy link worked, but is a nuisance, especially since I generally just clicked first.

Solution - after hunting through many google results, I finally was led to /usr/share/applications/mime.cache. I hunted for every line referring to opera, and moved that reference to after any mention of firefox-bin. Not sure why that worked, and similar edit to ~/.local/share/applications/mime.cache did not, but perhaps that's just a quirk of my setup.

Anyway - I'm not happy again.

So sorry to see that!

The reason for the different treatment is that when you click on a link, Balsa calls gtk_show_uri(), whereas the pop-up menu of alternatives that you get by right-clicking on the part list uses GAppInfo (specifically g_app_info_get_default_for_type() and g_app_info_get_all_for_type()) to find the supported actions for a part with the given content-type, here text/html. The top item in the menu is the one returned by g_app_info_get_default_for_type(), and that seems to have been firefox-bin, but gtk_show_uri() must have a different idea of the appropriate action.

I don't think Balsa can do anything different, as the two situations (showing a URI, and opening a text/html part) could easily require different actions, so it seems to make sense to allow the libraries to respond as they think fit. But I guess they could be less opaque in the information that they use to make those decisions.

Best,

Peter

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