On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 12:26:11PM -0500, Mark H. Wood wrote:
[cut]
> > Second(personal issue): I'm still having problems with
> > getting my html-mail to open(in a new tab) in my browser,
> > which is Firefox(Debianers call it iceweasel). Often,
> > when I use 'v' on an entry in my mutt display, and then
> > Arrow down to "3 . . . . [text/html . . . .", and then
> > press Enter, a new Tab does open in my browser, and I see
> > the html-mail displayed nicely. Even then I get, in my
> > browser-Tab: "file:///home/alan/tmp/mutt.html", but there
> > is no such file in my ~/tmp directory!
> >
> > But, too often, I get a quick new tab, a tenth of a second
> > look at the html I want to see, and then mutt "thinks better
> > of it" and I get a screen:
> > File not found Iceweasel can't find the file at
> > /home/alan/tmp/mutt.html
> >
> > The decision which way mutt will go between these two
> > alternatives is, as far as I can see, quite arbitrary.
>
> You probably need to add "; needsterminal" to your .mailcap entry for
> "text/html" so that Mutt will ask you to hit a key when the external
> program (Iceweasel) is finished. For more on .mailcap and how Mutt
> interprets it, see:
>
> http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/manual-5.html
>
> especially the section "Optional Fields".
>
> Background:
>
> This sounds like what is usually called a "race condition". Two
> processes are trying to use the same resource without sufficient
> coordination. Some times one process completes first, other times the
> other completes first. This causes differing behavior at different
> times.
>
> Here, I expect that Mutt is writing out that temporary file, invoking
> Iceweasel, and then cleaning up the temporary file without concerning
> itself with whether Iceweasel has had time to start itself and open
> the file. If Iceweasel already has the file open, then Mutt can
> delete it now and it will go away when Iceweasel closes it. Otherwise
> Iceweasel goes to open the file it was told to show, and the file is
> not there, because it was already deleted by Mutt.
>
> There are at least two ways to cure a race. The simple one is to get
> one process to wait for the other to finish, or at least fully start.
> The more complex (but preferred if it is not too difficult) way is to
> have the processes tell each other how they're proceeding so that each
> can make good decisions. The simple way here is to get Mutt to wait
> until you tell it to proceed.
third one, less scientific but "it works most of the times": add the
following lines to your ~/.mailcap
text/html; sensible-browser %s & sleep 2; nametemplate=%s.html
text/html; w3m -I %{charset} -T text/html -dump %s; print=w3m -I
%{charset} -T text/html -dump %s; nametemplate=%s.html; copiousoutput
you can substitute sensible-browser with iceweasel or firefox. I don't
remember why I did not set the test field on the first line:
test=sh -c 'test $DISPLAY'
