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

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

On Apr 13, 2010, at 11:22 PM, Christian Lynbech wrote:
> 
> While it could be that emacs-w3m does not do the right thing with
> mailto, it is still so that one cannot really know what `browse-url'
> really points to.

Well, that's Emacs, or Lisp, if you will.  You never know how a function is implemented...  Users/third-party packages can override a lot.

> Wouldn't it be a solution to just directly do what `browse-url' was
> normally expected to do rather than relying on the user or the
> third-party package having set everything up correctly?

Have a look at browse-url.el.  What would this be?
It's entirely system-dependent, so stopping short of replicating the code that determines `browse-url-browser-function', one could

(let ((browse-url-browser-function (default-value 'browse-url-browser-function)))
   (browse-url mailto-url))

If you're set up correctly, this would let the system handle the mailto URL, and the system would give control back to Emacs, because Emacs is your mail client.  And there you have your infinite loop again - it's just a wider loop.

The real problem here lies in the design.  `send-mail-function' is supposed to specify a function that sends e-mail off without further user interaction.  Because we can't do that out-of-the-box, we have to do something at a different level in the "control hierarchy": call the mail client and let the user edit the e-mail again (which is what mailto URLs lead to).
 
Perhaps we need a mechanism to leave send-mail-function nil by default, yet allow bug reporting functions to go through the mail client by default.

Or, one would set up a trivial little script on Savannah to receive a bug report by HTTP and then send the mail off.  That's roughly how most modern software solves the problem.