[icedtea-web] RFC: allow alternate means of finding browsers

[Omair Majid]

On 12/22/2010 06:29 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
> On 17:15 Wed 22 Dec     , Omair Majid wrote:
>> On 12/22/2010 03:42 PM, Dr Andrew John Hughes wrote:
>>> On 15:32 Wed 22 Dec     , Omair Majid wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> The attached patch allows netx to use a browser based on the BROWSER env
>>>> variable or using xdg-open, as opposed to relying on user-supplied
>>>> browser command.
>>>>
>>>> A new configuration option deployment.browser.source is used to
>>>> determine where to find the browser. If it is set to "PATH" (the
>>>> default), the configuration option deployment.browser.path is used. If
>>>> deployment.browser.source is set to "ENV" then the $BROWSER environment
>>>> variable is used. If deployment.browser.source is set to "XDG" then the
>>>> program xdg-open is used to launch the browser.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I would make XDG the default so it works like other applications on the system
>>> (which I presume use either this or $BROWSER) if deployment.browser.path is not set.
>>> Then NetX automatically picks up the system browser rather than prompting.
>>>
>>
>> Ah, great idea! Should I keep support for using $BROWSER or remove that
>> too in favour of xdg-open?
>>
>
> Please keep it.  I don't see how it does any harm.
>
> You might also want to consider the scenario that xdg-open is not available
> and fall back to $BROWSER then prompting if that is also empty.
>

Done.

>>> Shouldn't we do some basic sanity checks on the contents of getEnv? (And path too
>>> if we don't already)
>>>
>>
>> We should, and we dont do it for path either. Actually netx refers to
>> path as 'command' and that's how it deals with it too - it simply execs
>> "command url" to open the url. This allows a user to use a program name
>> (like firefox) instead of the entire path to it. So checking for
>> file/path existence makes this common case fail:
>> BROWSER=chromium-browser javaws foo.jnlp
>> (and similar for path). I dont see any simple way to check if the
>> command is valid - short of actually running the command. Do you have
>> any other sanity checks in mind?
>
> On *ix systems, you could run 'which command' and then execute the result of that
> instead.  How well that works depends if we want to allow options to be specified
> to the binary.
>

I am using the 'type' builtin to check if command is valid rather than 
'which' since the  behaviour of 'type' is a POSIX standard, while 
'which' may or may not return an error code on failure.

> I would at least check for things like \r and \n which would suggest something fishy to me.
> It doesn't immediately seem a huge issue as the netx binary is not privileged.
>

Also done.

Cheers,
Omair
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