Bug 35500

Summary: Default for $BROWSER under Mac OS X
Product: Portland Reporter: jmv16
Component: xdg-utilsAssignee: Portland Bugs <portland-bugs>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: low CC: jmv16
Version: 1.0Keywords: patch
Hardware: Other   
OS: Mac OS X (All)   
Whiteboard:
i915 platform: i915 features:

Description jmv16 2011-03-21 02:38:05 UTC 
Hi all --

xdg-open dies unhappily on OS X because $BROWSER is not set in the standard configuration, and it can't find any browser in an expected location.

I found the following elegant solution:

setenv BROWSER open

because there is a standard OS X command for this sort of thing (passes URLs to user's choice of webbrowser, opens documents in corresponding application) e.g. `open http://www.apple.com/`.


Perhaps a nice default if $BROWSER is not set but on OS X (e.g. $OSTYPE = darwin, or `uname` = Darwin) is to just pass the URL along to `open`.


-Jeff
Comment 1 jmv16 2011-03-21 02:39:40 UTC 
This is version 1.0.1 by the way.
Comment 2 Rex Dieter 2011-03-21 04:48:40 UTC 
What would help (esp coming from someone with access and knowledge of OSX),
1.  A scriptable way to identify osx platform.  for example, see detectDE() function in xdg-open.
2.  For osx platform, suggested values for $BROWSER , or even suggested specialized open_osx function(s).
Comment 3 jmv16 2011-03-21 19:20:51 UTC 
Rex --

I thought I provided answers to both of these questions?

My sh coding skils are too rusty to supply entire code fragments, but you can identify OS X by the $OSTYPE environment variable or by the output of `uname`, and by far the most sensible value for $BROWSER is simply "open" which will recognize a URL commandline argument and pass it to the user's default browser.  Hopefully that's enough info for someone else to code it up.

-Jeff
Comment 4 Rex Dieter 2011-03-31 07:41:24 UTC 
ok, if uname output is indeed 'Darwin' , we can utilize that.
Comment 6 Rex Dieter 2011-03-31 08:05:11 UTC 
So far, this only implements the mapping of
xdg-open => open
on Darwin platform, and doesn't touch any other utilities.

There's further work to be done to integrate the other bits.

One thing we could consider is setting BROWSER=open in the meantime as suggested (but not implemented).

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