Proposal: use /usr/bin/open as an alternative for run-mailcap and others.

[Charles Plessy]

Le Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 04:27:17AM +0900, Charles Plessy a écrit :
> 
> May I ask you for extra information on how important is it to support
> URLs, and if anything beyond file:/, http:// and https:// would need
> to be supported ?
...
> Also, can you give me a pointer to an explanation of what file:/ URLs
> are useful for ?  I read RFC 8089, but still did not get the point.
...
> Since `eog http://example.com/image.png` will open the image,
> shouldn't an "open" program ask to the server what the media type of
> the URL is, and pass it to the default program able to handle it,
> instead of just visualising in the browser ?

Hi all,

I hope I have not blasted you with my long answer and questions...

At the moment, I think that I will go ahead with shipping
`/usr/bin/open` as a symbolic link to `/usr/bin/run-mailcap` managed
with the alternatives system, and state in its manual page that opening
URLs is not supported for the moment but may be in the future.

Regarding the redundancy with `/usr/bin/see`, I think that it is not an
issue because 1) `see` was not intended to be provided by other packages
and 2) its purpose is to visualise the contents of a document, while the
purpose of `open` is to have the same effect as double-clicking on a
document's icon.  The difference is similar to the one between
"click-spacebar" and "double-click" on macOS.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles