[kde-linux] Thunderbird can't respond to hyperlink

[Duncan]

FrankK posted on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 18:37:21 -0700 as excerpted:

> If you're still with me here, fresh openSuse 11.2, DVD Firefox 3.0.
> something and DVD kde 4.3. T-bird came in a tarball from Mozilla.
> 
> T-bird Error Console writes an error related to load.URL when a
> hyperlink is clicked. Firefox is my default browser and T-bird is my
> default email according to Personal Settings.
> 
> Mozilla thinks this is an OS problem.

That sounds like a library ABI mismatch to me, so yes, an OS problem, or 
more accurately, a mismatch between the library the T-bird binaries were 
compiled against, and what the OS actually offers.  The problem could be 
either the version of the library available vs. expected, or the compiler 
and settings used, library vs. application trying to load it.

If that's correct, probably the easiest way to fix it would be to grab the 
version supplied by your distribution, OpenSuSE, instead of using an 
independently (Mozilla) compiled binary.  One of the things distributions 
/do/, as in, that's their purpose and that's what creating a distribution 
entails, technically, is ensure that everything they supply for a 
particular version matches up.  That is, everything's compiled with the 
same version of gcc, against the same set of standard libraries, etc, so 
not only the API (application programming interface, source compatibility) 
but the ABI (application binary interface, binary compatibility) as well, 
all matches.

Another alternative would be to grab the sources and compile it yourself, 
but that has some complications on most binary based distributions since 
they often split library headers and other /development/ related files 
into their own packages separate from the binaries, so you'll likely need 
to install a bunch of extra development packages in ordered to get it to 
work.  Still, it's a reasonable alternative, if a bit more work, 
particularly if you can't find a properly compatible binary package.

A third alternative, in theory, would be to recompile the libraries to 
match the T-Bird binaries, but that's likely to break other programs that 
depend on them, so it's not such a good idea in practice.

But I don't use T-Bird myself and I run Gentoo, not OpenSuSE, so could 
well be wrong.  It just sounds enough like an ABI issue (which are 
reasonably common on Gentoo as it's all build-from-source and constantly 
updated, so new versions of packages break ABIs and even APIs all the 
time, thus Gentoo has special tools to fix the problem) to me, that it was 
worth the reply, in the hope that it'll help.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman