RFH: non-blocking desktop conforming viewer

[Norbert Preining <preining@logic.at>]

Dear all,

I am searching for a method to call a desktop conforming viewer
that is blocking, i.e., that does not immediately return.

Background: texdoc is the main tool to search for the waste amount
of TeX documentation shipped. It supports also zipped (various
formats) docs, but needs a viewer that is non-blocking, otherwise
the temporary uncompressed file will hang around forever.

Some time ago I switched from using "see" on Debian as the default
texdoc viewer to "xdg-open" to make sure that proper selection
of viewers are used (proper for the current desktop environment).

Unfortunately, xdg-open, at least under gnome, is non-blocking, i.e.,
immediately returns (in fact it is the underlying gvfs-open that 
returns immediately), which makes it impossible to use texdoc
for searching and viewing compressed docs.

I see several options here:
* forget about compressed documentation
  PDF since format 1.4 has internal compression, meaning that 
  the other compression does not win a lot at all
  We could advise packagers to use dh_compress -X.pdf

* go back to see
  not my favorite

* use a fixed list of viewers configured and force every user
  to change the viewer himself
  not my favorite

I would be very happy about further opinions, suggestions, options

Thanks a lot

Norbert

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Norbert Preining            preining@{jaist.ac.jp, logic.at, debian.org}
JAIST, Japan                                 TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094   fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76  A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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