[3924] in Release_7.7_team
Mozilla 1.4 default MIME handler problems
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert A Basch)
Fri Jul 11 18:38:09 2003
Message-Id: <200307112236.h6BMawJW023533@abulia.mit.edu>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 18:36:58 -0400
From: Robert A Basch <rbasch@MIT.EDU>
In Mozilla 1.4, there is a new "use system default" property that can
be set for a MIME type; the user can set this property when configuring
helper applications in the preferences editor dialog. Unfortunately,
the implementation appears to be badly broken. When the property is
set, Mozilla looks up the handler in the mailcap database (it looks
for the global mailcap in /etc, but that could be easily fixed), but
only extracts the executable name from the command string. Since our
mailcap is set up to use handlers in the mimeutils locker, this fails
miserably (it ends up invoking "athrun <filename>"). From browsing
bugzilla, it appears that the mailcap-related code has other problems.
To top it off, when there is a problem invoking the handler, an error
message is popped up which cannot be dismissed, at least on Solaris.
Since a user would have to explicitly choose to use the system default
application when configuring the MIME type in the preferences editor,
I don't think this is necessarily a showstopper for upgrading to 1.4.
It is not offered as an option when you try to load a file type whose
handling has not been defined. I lean toward leaving it as a known
problem, at least until the mailcap-related bugs are fixed (there
appear to be several bugs filed in bugzilla about this). If that
happens, we will still need to change our mailcap and mimeutils
configuration to work well with Mozilla (they are currently set up to
work with pine, i.e. a command-line based tool).
Too bad Mozilla doesn't use gnome-vfs....
Bob
