Re: introduction of x-www-browser virtual package
On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 09:14:07AM +0900, Ansgar Burchardt wrote:
No, the alternatives system is not really useful for users (as only root
can choose an alternative). Having root choose a single
{editor,pager,browser,...} for all users is not a good solution.
Right now we have at least one package (one of the lxde* ones) shipping
a .desktop file that references x-www-browser but does not guarantee
that x-www-browser exists; this can be resolved via a virtual package.
I agree that it might be better if the .desktop file did not reference
x-www-browser (which is a system-wide preference) and instead used a
tool that respected a user-wide preference.
sensible-x-www-browser doesn't exist so we can't use that, and I'll
refrain from commenting on whether it's a good idea or not, for now.
If that package instead used xdg-open, it would need to depend upon
xdg-utils and whatever transitive dependencies that implied; and I'm
not sure the result would necessarily guarantee that a GUI web browser
was installed either, so the bug ultimately would not be fixed: we still
need a means to guarantee a GUI web browser is installed, and
x-www-browser is the only scheme I can think of right now.
Before I file the bugs to create the vpackage, I plan to perform one
further investigation: if the .desktop file used TryExec instead of
Exec, would the LXDE panel display the corresponding button/icon if
the TryExec is not satisfied?
(the x-www-browser vpackage dependency would not proclude also modifying
the .desktop file to use xdg-open)
--
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⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Jonathan Dowland
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