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

[James Tyrer]

Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Wednesday, 2010-03-17, James Tyrer wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> I am pretty sure that KWin has no influence on how applications handle their 
> internal data.
> 
> The question is what happens exactly.
> I take it that when an http URL is clicked in a mail displayed by Thunderbird, 
> something generates an error, but we do not yet know whether this error is in 
> a message box or written to a log/commandline.
> And if it is a message box, does it come from Thunderbird or KDE?
> 

OK, so I looked into this a bit more.

I found an error:

	"Couldn't load XPCOM"

So, perhaps this is a Firefox problem.  Especially since it will open 
URLs in Konqueror. :-|

-- 
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch