KDE applications need kfmclient to open links, which is not shipped with kdebase/runtime

[David Faure]

On Saturday 29 November 2008, Mark Kretschmann wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 10:16 PM, Diederik van der Boor
> <vdboor at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Op Tuesday 25 November 2008 21:44:25 David Faure schreef:
> >> > Another thing: Wouldn't it make sense to use the default broswer on the
> >> > installed system (sensible-browser, x-www-browser or whatever) if no
> >> > default browser is chosen in KDE? Encouraging people to use Konqueror is
> >> > nice for sure, but the user does have to change his default browser in
> >> > one less place then.
> >>
> >> No, this goes way too far. Someone trying KDE should at least be able to
> >> enjoy the good integration with konqueror, before deciding if he/she wants
> >> it or not. If KDE launches x-www-browser (*) by default (which is old
> >> Mozilla here), we lose that (and basically this kills konqueror, given that
> >> most people do not change defaults). A sensible default for KDE _is_
> >> konqueror; people can switch to something else if they want.
> >>
> >>
> >> (*) sensible-browser defaults to x-www-browser unless $BROWSER is set, so
> >> this is old mozilla again here. Nice...
> >
> > I disagree here. People are running KDE applications outside of KDE, why
> > should we enforce them to use more of KDE?
> >
> > For example, I got multiple requests from GNOME users why KMess wasn't opening
> > their default browser (firefox), and how they could change that.
> > We constantly had to answer how they to install kdebase and navigate through
> > KControl. Nowadays we've added a "preferred browser" option in our settings
> > dialog as workaround. Amarok 1 also does this.
> >
> > This is quite an ugly fix to deal with reality, and I would prefer to see
> > instead that KDE respects the preferred browser setting of the active desktop
> > (whether it's GNOME, Windows XP or MacOS).
> >
> > If you're worried this kills Konqueror, isn't that what _defaults_ are meant
> > for? But if the user wants to move away from those defaults, it should not be
> > utter pain.
> 
> I have to agree here with Diederik. Your arguments make sense and are
> hard to dispute.

This isn't about "him vs me", since we were not talking about the same thing :)
I'm all OK with kde apps starting another browser when not inside a KDE desktop,
but the solution used for that, has to work with the other case too, i.e. starting
konqueror by default when inside KDE. And that's not the case right now with xdg-open.

IMHO the proper solution is to fix xdg-open first, so that it detects that I'm inside
KDE correctly.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Qt Software @ Nokia to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).