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.
