Bug#712299: iceape: Iceape becomes default x-www-browser

Lorenzo Sutton lorenzofsutton at gmail.com
Sat Jun 15 19:37:24 UTC 2013


Dear Axel,

Thanks for the CC, private email was an error.

On 15/06/13 12:14, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi Lorenzo,
>
> I'm Cc'ing the bug-report again as I think this discussion should be
> public.
>
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2013 at 11:34:42AM +0200, Lorenzo Sutton wrote:
>>> There is such a mechanism. See the update-alternatives(8) man page.
>>
>> I'm aware of the update-alternatives.
>> What I'm saying is that it would be more friendly if when a
>> (x-www-browser) browser is already present and selected installing
>> another one (in this case iceape) wouldn't necessarily change the
>> current x-www-browser.
>
> In my humble opinion, you can't expect that the first web browser ever
> installed on a system stays the default forever.
>
> But besides that, the administrator as well as the user do have this
> choice. They just have to state it once explicitly. (They're not asked
> automatically, though. They have to take action theirselves.)
> Otherwise the packages will continue to choose the default.

I see your point now. Ok agree on the fact that this should probably be 
more general. The only slight difference with iceape is that it's not 
just a browser but more of a 'suite' which was my initial reason to file 
this as bug. But I see that after discussion that would be nitpicking.
So do close the bug and thanks for the opinion exchange and taking time 
to answer.

Lorenzo
>
> The details:
>
> update-alternatives supports not changing x-www-browser upon
> installation of an alternative with higher priority. I mentioned it
> briefly in my initial reply. I'll make an example more specific on
> that topic below.
>
>> In my case iceweasel had already been installed and was of course
>> the x-www-browser.
>>
>> Ultimately what I mean is that the user should have the choice to
>> decide what has higher priority, and not the package.
>
> As administrator you have to explicitly choose any browser in "manual
> mode" (i.e. the user's choice is honoured) instead of "auto mode"
> (i.e. the packages decide which seems the best), as I did here:
>
> # update-alternatives --config x-www-browser
> There are 13 choices for the alternative x-www-browser (providing
> /usr/bin/x-www-browser).
>
>    Selection    Path                   Priority   Status
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>    0            /usr/bin/opera          200       auto mode
>    1            /usr/bin/chromium       40        manual mode
> * 2            /usr/bin/conkeror       20        manual mode
>    3            /usr/bin/dillo          50        manual mode
>    4            /usr/bin/iceweasel      70        manual mode
>    5            /usr/bin/luakit         10        manual mode
>    6            /usr/bin/midori         50        manual mode
>    7            /usr/bin/netsurf        100       manual mode
>    8            /usr/bin/opera          200       manual mode
>    9            /usr/bin/surf           30        manual mode
>    10           /usr/bin/uzbl-browser   10        manual mode
>    11           /usr/bin/vimprobable2   20        manual mode
>    12           /usr/bin/xlinks2        69        manual mode
>    13           /usr/bin/xxxterm        50        manual mode
>
> Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:
> [...]
>
> In my case, the default browser by package choice would be the
> non-free opera package (priority 200), but I prefer to have conkeror
> as default browser system-wide. So I've chosen option 2 (conkeror in
> manual mode). Now, conkeror stays x-www-browser even if I'd install a
> browser which says that it has priority 300.
>
> Besides that, each user can still override the default browser per user
> instead of using the system-wide setting via x-www-browser by two ways:
>
> 1) In case of using a desktop environment, usually the desktop
>     environment allows to change the default web browser for the
>     current user. (This may depend on the desktop environment -- at
>     least GNOME offered to configure that the last time I checked.)
>
> 2) For users without a full-blown desktop environment there's also
>     /usr/bin/sensible-browser (of the package sensible-utils) which, in
>     addition to the above, checks if the environment variable $BROWSER
>     is set as well if GNOME is running, in which case it prefers
>     gnome-www-browser over x-www-browser. It can even run text-mode
>     based browsers like lynx and w3m in a terminal if prefered by the
>     user.
>
> In my humble opinion, those three places to change the default web
> browser together allow full and fine granulated control over which
> alternatives is used in which situation for each, the administrator,
> for the desktop environment user as well as for the commandline user.
>
> If you think, that all is still not a good enough solution, i.e.
> because they're not asked without taking action theirselves, I would
> recommend you to file a more general bug instead of this one against a
> single web browser which can't and won't change the overall situation
> and infrastructure.
>
> update-alternatives is part of the dpkg package, so I think that
> filing a bug report against dpkg would be a proper starting point. I
> though suspect that this would be a more general discussion, maybe
> held on the debian-devel at lists.debian.org mailing list.
>
> 		Regards, Axel
>



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