Re: GNUMail (svn build 947): openURL regression issue

On 08/01/2026 21:50, Patrick Cardona wrote:

> Hello Richard,
>
> On 2026-01-04 20:47:52 +0100 R Frith-Macdonald <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I think there is something related to openURL service: I made more tests.

I'm afraid you seem to be really complicating/confusing the issue by 
adding in all sorts of extra information.

When there's an issue to be solved, we need to simplify things as much 
as possible to get to the core of the issue, rather than additing 
information about lots of unrelated things.

So ... you talk about setting things in Preferences.app - that's not 
part of the core GNUstep project, and I don't know where to get that 
code or what it does, but you talk about using it for app wrappers so I 
suspect it's actually got nothing to do with the openURL service (since 
services are implemented by GNUstep apps). An app wrapper (at least in 
the sense I'm familiar with) provides a script to launch a non-GNUstep 
program from a GNUstep app.  It doesn't open URLs.  If you actually 
meant SystemPreferences.app, I'm pretty sure it should only let you 
select the preferred app to open a URL depending on the scheme of the 
URL (from among the available apps that support that scheme).

You also talk about xdg-open ... which is also not a GNUstep facility 
and is basically unrelated to the openURL service.  The only connection 
is that, if the openURL service is not available or fails, the current 
GUI code will try to open the URL as if it was a file of unknown type, 
and that may call xdg-open.

So, when GNUMail wants to open a URL,  unless it's a file scheme URL (in 
which case the file should be opened), there are basically three things 
the GUI library will try:

1. ask the preferred GNUstep app to open the URL, but I don't know of 
any GNUstep web browser, so this stage would probably be skipped

2. try to perform any available openURL service ... since we discussed 
implementing an open URL service before, I expected this is what woul 
were having a problem with.

3. fall back to trying to open the URL ask an unknown file type

You could eliminate problems with (1) as a possibility ... that should 
be easy since the only problem likely here would be if your managed to 
configure the preferred app for opening the URL to be something that 
doesn't support it (somethjng that's not a GNUstep app, or a GNUstep app 
whoch is broken in some way).

You could also eliminate problems with  (3) as a possibility ... perhaps 
disable xdg-open or configure it so you can easily tell if it was called.

You can add some debug to your Open URL service, so you can see what 
it's doing.

But basically I stand by the comments in my previous email:  your 
screenshot indicates an issue with firefox.  Yes that could be related 
to the way you are trying to use firefox, but if so you need to narrow 
down to find out exactly how you are invoking it.