Bug#570376: texdoc barfs if BROWSER has multiple colon-separated commands
On Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 10:21:22PM +0200, Hilmar Preuße wrote:
> Hi Julian,
>
> I'm going through some old bugs.
Hi Hilmar,
Thanks for this!
> > I try running the command "texdoc eqnarray" and I get the error
> > message:
> > sh: links:lynx: not found
> >
> > This is because my BROWSER environment variable contains "links:lynx",
> > as allowed in the specification of the BROWSER variable.
> >
> > So texdoc should parse this variable (and perhaps others), using the
> > first one available.
> >
> I can still reproduce the issue and I have some comments. I used the
> documentation progress20030701, which is in texlive-latex-extra-doc.
>
> 1. What kind of specification are you referring to? Is this a Debian
> specification, if not where can I find it?
Ooh, that's a good question.
It seems that it was a project started by Eric Raymond, described
here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/
man(1) has a description of BROWSER matching this, and bts(1) follows
the same convention, as does the python webbrowser module,
apparently.
However, sensible-browser does not respect this, and I can't easily
find any other mentions of it.
Ho hum... So it looks like it never really caught on.
> 2. In addition to variable browser you can set the var BROWSER_texdoc,
> which specifies just one browser program. This way you can make texdoc
> work w/ changing the value of BROWSER.
Yes, though that is a hack ;-)
I think the solution is just to ensure that BROWSER only has one
executable listed!
Best wishes,
Julian
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