Re: mailclient-send-it usage of browse-url

[David Reitter <david.reitter@gmail.com>]

On Apr 14, 2010, at 9:07 AM, <christian.lynbech@tieto.com> wrote:
> 
> I do not about Windows, but on Mac you can (I believe) rely on the
> *presence* of sendmail just as much as on other UNIX like systems.

Yes, you can rely on the presence, but not on its function.  Mail will be swallowed in many cases, as I have pointed out, and that is true independently of the system.  (I only expect GNU/Linux users to be more savvy about their system / Emacs configuration.)
> 
>  If it works out of
> the box, it only does so because somebody took the time to figure what
> the default should be on a Mac.

The default is flexible.

> In fact, looking at the default setup
> for browse-url on emacs23 , it does not seem to be working out of the
> box on a Mac. "browse-url.el" will search for a number of programs such
> as firefox or konqueror but not Safari (which is all you can rely on on
> a Mac) and if you do not have any of the browsers in your path (perhaps
> because you use some desktop environment menu rather than setting up
> path), it fails.

Can you point to the code that does that?
`browse-url-browser-function' is initialized (defcustom) and set to `browse-url-default-macosx-browser' on a Mac, which is a function that calls "open".  That will do the right thing in all relevant cases of a http:// or mailto: URLs.

The system keeps track of the user-preferred mail client and web browser.

Could you investigate why that doesn't work for you?

> If you are using emacs-w3m which I think is a quite
> reasonable thing to do, the mailto: hack fails.

Why is it a hack again?
It relies on accepted and standardized URLs.  I have previously pointed out the standard to you.

Brittle, maybe.  But less brittle than most other solutions...