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

[James Tyrer]

Duncan wrote:
> 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.
> 
I find that KDE (probably KWin) screws up URLs taken from Thunderbird. 
This may be GTK vs Qt/KDE but it does appear to be a KDE issue.

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch