Software-center opens wrong browser when the Programmer's website is clicked on the aplication view

[Nuno Mota]

Although I'm not a programmer I did a little research on the bug.

The software-center uses the python module webbrowser to open the url which should always open the correct browser, but in my system it open Chromium instead of Firefox.

checked with:
gconftool --get /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command
firefox %s

So I opened a python console and tested the webbrowser.open('google.com') and still opens chromium instead of firefox.

Browsing through the webbrowser module's source code found the in gnome environments it tries to use the gnome-open command which is not available in Precise Pangolin. When installed the needed packages everything works as expected.

Thus I'm almost sure that the problem isn't in the Software Center but I've reached the limit of my skills to track down this small bug and decided to report it here where I first detected it.

Hope that my research can help someone to fix the bug.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: software-center 5.1.11
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-18.28-generic-pae 3.2.9
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-18-generic-pae i686
ApportVersion: 1.94.1-0ubuntu1
Architecture: i386
Date: Wed Mar 7 21:29:51 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release i386 (20111012)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=pt:pt_BR:en
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=pt_PT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: software-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to precise on 2012-03-02 (5 days ago)

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hello Nuno! You may not describe yourself as a programmer, but I must say that you did a fine job of investigating and providing info for this bug.

Based on the info you provided, I think we can take it from here and investigate the underlying issue and the best way to fix this for software-center.

You can follow this report for updates, etc.

Thanks again!

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hi Nuno, just a quick update. So, gnome-open is deprecated and we use gvfs-open now, which is part of the gvfs-bin package which is in the Precise desktop. Could you please do an update to latest Precise and check to see if you still get this error? Thanks for your help!

[Nuno Mota (nmota)]

Hi Gary. I have bad news and good news. On the command-line gvfs-open always does what it should, but the software-center always opens the chromium browser, no matter which one I set as default.

So the problem on my system remains.

I decided to try to reproduce this behaviour on a virtual machine and I can't, so I guess it may be due to a misconfiguration on my system because I did an upgrade from 11.10 to 12.04 beta1 and I am using Firefox Aurora etc...

Doing this I think I found another bug, this time not just on softwar-center. Ubuntu seems to ignore the default applications set by the user eg: vlc -- Totem; banshee-- rhythmbox; chromium -- firefox. It always opens the applications that are installed by default.
This one I can reproduce on my system and on the virtual machine.

I guess this is out of the scope of this bug, but tell me if you can reproduce this as well before I open another bug on launchpad. Not sure which package should I point this to....

Best regards

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

This should be fixed with the fix for:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/python2.7/+bug/971311

Could you please try if the new python helps?

[Nuno Mota (nmota)]

Yes it helps. This specific bug is fixed for me as I can no longer reproduce it.

There is still a small problem. Now Ubuntu seems to respect the default applications set by the user with the exception of the video player, which is weird.

Bes regards

[Gary Lasker (gary-lasker)]

Hello again Nuno, and thanks for reporting back! Ok, it sounds like this specific bug is now fixed per the Python update that mvo mentioned, so I will close this one.

Thanks again for your report and your help, and please continue to send bug reports if you encounter any other issues or problems!

Best regards,
Gary