Re: Standardize BROWSER and MAILER environment variables.

Guillem Jover <[email protected]> Tue, 17 Oct 2023 23:41:58 +0200
Newsgroups gmane.linux.xdg.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi!

On Mon, 2023-10-16 at 20:14:03 +0200, Slatian wrote:
> So a specification would have to include:
> * When are those supposed to be called
> * What are possible arguments
> * Fancy %s syntax (or clearly state that it isn't possible)
> * Quoting and escaping (or clearly state a lack of it)
> * How fallbacks are supposed to be handled
> 
> I'm in favor of having as few features as possible to make it easy to
> implement correctly without any libraries or helpers.
> 
> Before writing a draft, Id like to collect already existing implementations
> of those variables.
> 
> The ones I currently know about are:
> * xdg-utils (as described above)
> * newsboat (BROWSER, with %u instead of %s, no fallback)

There's also sensible-browser from the sensible-utils project.

  https://salsa.debian.org/debian/sensible-utils

But doing a couple of quick queries:

  https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%24BROWSER&literal=1&perpkg=1&page=1
  https://codesearch.debian.net/search?q=%22BROWSER%22&literal=1&perpkg=1

there seems to be lots of usage for the BROWSER env variable. You
might want to check there.

Thanks,
Guillem