Bug#172436: [PROPOSAL] web browser url viewing

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org> writes:
> On Tue, 04 Mar 2008, Russ Allbery wrote:

>> I have gotten no further feedback on this proposal other than Clint's
>> note that he finds this better-specified than the original ESR BROWSER
>> specification, but hesitates to comment further since he doesn't use
>> it.  I would like to resolve this bug for the next Policy release, but
>> I don't want to just commit patches on my own say-so.

> I'm not sure this change is still needed. While it might be good to have
> such a mechanism for some non-graphical programs, it probably makes most
> of Gnome programs buggy since they have their own method of browser
> selection (based on xdg-open AFAIK) and I'm not sure that they would
> conform to this specification.

> Thus I would rather NACK this policy change.

I think the point about GNOME is very well-taken.  However, I wonder if we
should change the wording that we're using to handle that case rather than
not making the change at all.  I'm not sure that the change is necessary,
in that it seems like most packages affected have already made the
relevant changes, but there are still some issues that are addressed by
this change:

* sensible-browser is currently undocumented, but sensible-editor and
  sensible-pager are documented in Policy.  It would be nice to document
  all of them.

* Policy should probably document the x-www-browser and www-browser
  alternatives for interoperability.  Right now, maintainers of browsers
  have to just know about them.

* There are various different ways in which BROWSER can be implemented,
  and it would be nice to tell Debian users *somewhere* what
  implementation they can expect.

All of those would be addressed by incorporating some version of this
change.  Maybe we should just back off on honoring BROWSER in the face of
more explicit configuration?  For example, we could say that BROWSER and
(x-)www-browser should only be used if the package doesn't use a desktop
environment that provides a mechanism for opening a document in a
preferred browser.

I can try to come up with revised wording if people think this is worth
pursuing.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>