[Python-Dev] webbrowser.py

[Moshe Zadka]

On Tue, 23 Jan 2001 22:46:47 -0500, Guido van Rossum <guido@digicool.com> wrote:

[ESR]
> You've never heard of BROWSER because I invented it and have not
> widely popularized it yet :-).

[Guido v. Rossum]
> Grumble.  That wasn't the kind of answer I expected.  I don't like it
> if Python is used as a wedge to get a particular thing introduced to
> the rest of the world, no matter how useful it may seem at the time.

Guido, I think you're being over-dramatic. BROWSER is right in the
tradition of PAGER and EDITOR, and a lot of other programs need it.
I know Eric uses RH and mutt, so probably RH's urlview program (which
mutt uses to jump to URLs) uses BROWSER. I was just about to submit
a bug report to Debian that their urlview doesn't respect it.

And if you really don't want to be a horse in front of a cart...

> Anyway, shouldn't you also talk to the developers of packages like KDE
> and Gnome?  Surely their users would like to be able to configure the
> default webbrowser.

Yes -- via GNOME/KDE specific mechanisms. I have 0 experience with KDE,
but I'm guessing the GNOME guys would do it via the GNOME "registry".
KDE probably has something similar. I'm sure you wouldn't want Python
to depend on GNOME, though it would be nice to make the browser-choosing
part pluggable so when "import gnome" is done, it automatically tries
to choose the user's browser.

On UNIX (as opposed to GNOME/KDE, which are pretty much operating systems
themselves), these things are done via environment variable. And $BROWSER
doesn't seem like that much of an innovation.
-- 
Moshe Zadka <sig@zadka.site.co.il>
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