On Tuesday, 2013-12-24, 17:06:08, Thomas Kluyver wrote: > On 24 December 2013 16:37, Kevin Krammer <[email protected]> wrote: > > Well, a quick check would have revealed that it is. > > Cross platform development always requires testing on the targetted > > platforms, > > one can not simply assume things. > > But I don't go and check that simple commands like cp or grep will work on > a Mac.
Depends on the arguments you provide to these commands. We all know very well that these commands can vary in capabilities, behavior and understood commandline switches a lot depending on platform. > It's easy to see how someone could have assumed that 'open' is a > similarly common command and would work on Linux systems. Of course you can > blame developers who make incorrect assumptions, but why not aim to make > the obvious assumptions correct? I am not blaming anyone for making assumptions, correct or otherwise. I am just saying that assumptions need to be verified. Either by research or by testing. Just to be clear I also do not blame the developers for not testing on Linux or not caring about supporting their software on Linux. > > Even if a tool or command with the same name exists it might have >> different capabilities, arguments or options. > > That is a valid concern - OSX's open has several options that xdg-open does > not (currently). But I think the benefit of having a similar obvious way to > load files and URLs outweighs that. Developers are also familiar with > common commands like cc and make being provided by different > implementations that may support different options. It will still need testing, so there is no magic bullet. If the software vendor does not want to use a different code path in their main software and rely on calling 'open' then they can simply ship a trivial shell script that forwards the arguments to xdg-open. Or do it the other way around and use a simple redirector on OS X, with the additional benefit of not having to know the installation path since 'xdg- open' is likely not used by anything else on the platform that is not xdg- open. Cheers, Kevin -- Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer KDE user support, developer mentoring
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