Ok, discussion turned up two problems, fixable by changing two words: Web browsers ------------ Some programs have the ability to launch a web browser to display an URL. Since there are lots of different web browsers available in the Debian distribution, the system administrator and each user should have the possibility to choose a preferred web browser. In addition, programs should choose a good default web browser if none is selected by the user or system administrator. | Thus, every program that launches a web browser with an URL should use the BROWSER environment variable to determine what browser the user wishes to use. The value of BROWSER may consist of a colon-separated series of browser command parts. These should be tried in order until one succeeds. Each command part may optionally contain the string "%s"; if it does, the URL to be viewed is substituted there. If a command part does not contain %s, the browser is to be launched as if the URL had been supplied as its first argument. The string %% must be substituted as a single % <footnote> This browser variable was proposed by Eric Raymond at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER/ </footnote> | If the BROWSER environment variable is not set, the program can use /usr/bin/x-www-browser if DISPLAY is set, and /usr/bin/www-browser if not. These two files are managed through the dpkg alternatives mechanism. Thus every package providing a general-purpose web browser must call the update-alternatives program to register the appopriate one of these alternatives. Instead of implementing the above in every program that runs a web browser, programs in Debian may be configured to use /usr/bin/sensible-browser . This is a program provided by the Debian base system that checks the BROWSER environment variable, and falls back to /usr/bin/x-www-browser or /usr/bin/www-browser if it is not set. In other words, we won't make BROWSER mandatory yet, since a few programs still need to implement it (I suspect gnome and kde are the most prominent that do not support BROWSER yet). And I have clarified the advice about how a program can work out a default browser to use, by avoiding a restricted word. I hope this is enough to get it seconded yet again, and into policy. -- see shy jo
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