xdg-email does not detect LXDE in Lubuntu mailto: URIs in chromium handled poorly

[Jonathan Marsden]

Binary package hint: xdg-utils

xdg-email is supposed to detect various desktop environments including LXDE and uses this to decide how best to send an email.
In Lubuntu 11.04 (and in 10.10) this is not working as expected.

In consequence, mailto: URIs in chromium are handled incorrectly and instead of an email client being launched, an additional copy of chromium is launched, which does not help the user send an email.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: xdg-utils 1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic i686
Architecture: i386
Date: Sat May 7 11:30:25 2011
Dependencies:

InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - i386 (20101203)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: xdg-utils
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jonathan Marsden (jmarsden)]

The detectDE function in /usr/bin/xdg-email checks for $DESKTOP_SESSION being "LXDE".

In Lubuntu, this check fails, because $DESKTOP_SESSION is "Lubuntu" and $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP is "LXDE".

A patch to test $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP seems appropriate and is under construction.

Once this works, a further small patch to xdg-email may be required to have it launch an appropriate client in LXDE...

[Jonathan Marsden (jmarsden)]

debdiff attached.

Fixes were needed to xdg-email and also to xdg-mime so the default can be changed, e.g. for people who install Thunderbird.

[Jonathan Marsden (jmarsden)]

I'm not entirely sure wishlist is appropriate here.

Lubuntu is on its way to becoming an official Ubuntu flavour this (Oneiric) release cycle, and for its default browser (chromium-browser) not to open mailto: links is, in my view, a significant issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package xdg-utils - 1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu5

---------------
xdg-utils (1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu5) oneiric; urgency=low

  * rename debian/patches/debian-changes-1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu4 to
    lp779156-lubuntu.diff and make DEP-3 compliant. Correctly reference
    LP: #779156 so the bug gets auto-closed.
 -- Jamie Strandboge <email address hidden> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 08:50:04 -0500

[Christoph Wickert (cwickert)]

Was this patch ever upstreamed? I don't see it in the freedesktop.org bug tracker.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Jonathan, could you reply to that question? if you don't want that change to be dropped at some point it should go upstream...

[Chad Miller (cmiller)]

A postmortem:

+- command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2- | first_word`"
++ command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2- | sed -e 's/ .*$//'`"

This change was incorrect. "first_word" both "read"s one line and discards everything after a space. "sed" operates on many lines. Thus, more than on Exec in a desktop file are both legal and incorrectly joined together into command as "first\nsecond\third".