Bug#1065301: Please stop hijacking mailto: by default

[Rob Browning]

Eduard Bloch  writes:

> I have recently experienced a little discomfort, when my regular click
> on some mailto: link in a browser started opening Emacs (which I have
> not configured for this purpose and never wanted to use it for Mail).
> Instead of my regular mutt-in-terminal.

I spoke to someone who was more knowledgeable about the current state of
affairs, and they said that applications can't control the priorities
with desktop files the way they could with mailcap.  So emacs can only
say that it provides mailto support (which it does via notmuch, gnus,
rmail, etc.), but it can't set itself at a "lower" priority.

However, you can specify your own priorities either via your browser's
mechanism (settings > general > applications in firefox), or possibly
(it sounds like) via overrides provided by a desktop like gnome (if you
use it).  i.e. while I haven't used gnome in a while, it sounds like
they have a "default applications" option under settings.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Rob Browning
rlb @defaultvalue.org and @debian.org
GPG as of 2011-07-10 E6A9 DA3C C9FD 1FF8 C676 D2C4 C0F0 39E9 ED1B 597A
GPG as of 2002-11-03 14DD 432F AE39 534D B592 F9A0 25C8 D377 8C7E 73A4

Bug#1065301: Please stop hijacking mailto: by default

[Eduard Bloch]

Package: emacs-common
Version: 1:29.2+1-2
Severity: minor

Hi,

I have recently experienced a little discomfort, when my regular click
on some mailto: link in a browser started opening Emacs (which I have
not configured for this purpose and never wanted to use it for Mail).
Instead of my regular mutt-in-terminal.

So I looked around and found:

/usr/share/applications/emacs-mail.desktop:Exec=emacs -f message-mailto %u
/usr/share/applications/emacsclient-mail.desktop:# u=$(echo "$1" | sed 
's/[\"]/\\&/g'); exec emacsclient --alternate-editor= --reuse-frame --eval 
"(message-mailto \"$u\")"
/usr/share/applications/emacsclient-mail.desktop:Exec=sh -c "u=\\$(echo 
\\"\\$1\\" | sed 's/[\\"]/&/g'); exec /usr/bin/emacsclient 
--alternate-editor= --reuse-frame --eval \\"(message-mailto 
\\"\\$u\\")\\"" sh %u
/usr/share/applications/emacsclient-mail.desktop:Exec=sh -c "u=\\$(echo 
\\"\\$1\\" | sed 's/[\\"]/&/g'); exec /usr/bin/emacsclient 
--alternate-editor= --create-frame --eval \\"(message-mailto 
\\"\\$u\\")\\"" sh %u
/usr/share/applications/emacsclient-mail.desktop:Exec=emacs -f message-mailto %u

In my opinion, this is quite crude. Why are you pushing this
"emacslient" as default application as part of a BASE package?
Please stop doing that. Or move it to some optional package like
"emacslient-integration" which installs those application configs.

And I, for one, will uninstall emacs completely now. I kept it as
backup, but this brings me over the edge, sorry.

Best regards,
Eduard.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: trixie/sid
  APT prefers unstable-debug
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable-debug'), (500, 'oldoldstable'), (500, 
'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental-debug'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 6.8.0-rc6+ (SMP w/16 CPU threads; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled

Versions of packages emacs-common depends on:
ii  dconf-gsettings-backend [gsettings-backend]  0.40.0-4+b1
ii  emacs-el 1:29.2+1-2
ii  emacsen-common   3.0.5
ii  init-system-helpers  1.66
ii  install-info 7.1-3

emacs-common recommends no packages.

Versions of packages emacs-common suggests:
pn  emacs-common-non-dfsg  
ii  ncurses-term   6.4+20240113-1

-- no debconf information

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