Debian Bug report logs - #746707
empty application chooser popup for URIs

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Message #5 received at submit@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: submit@bugs.debian.org

Subject: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 19:59:59 +0200

Package: epiphany-browser
Version: 3.4.2-2.1
Severity: important


I have configured a handler for the tel: URI prefix and confirmed the
settings are present in gconf:

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/command
/usr/bin/sipdialer %s

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/needs_terminal
false

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/enabled
true



I create a test.html containing:

<a href="tel:+442071234567">dial it</a>

Clicking the link in Epiphany gives this error (I'm not sure if it is
just for "tel" or all manually configured prefixes):

Oops! It was not possible to show this website

The website at tel:+442071234567 seems to be unavailable. The precise
error was:

URL cannot be shown

It could be temporarily switched off or moved to a new address. Don't
forget to check that your internet connection is working correctly.



Expected action: Epiphany should give the URI to the handler configured
in the desktop.

Message #10 received at 746707-done@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>

To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>, 746707-done@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 20:31:53 +0200

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 19:59 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
> I have configured a handler for the tel: URI prefix and confirmed the
> settings are present in gconf:

GConf is no longer where such settings are stored. 
You need to set a x-scheme-handler/tel MIME association.

-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-

Message #15 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org, 746707-done@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 20:33:53 +0200

On 02/05/14 20:31, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 19:59 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>> I have configured a handler for the tel: URI prefix and confirmed the
>> settings are present in gconf:
> 
> GConf is no longer where such settings are stored. 
> You need to set a x-scheme-handler/tel MIME association.
> 

There is a lot of documentation about the gconf approach (including in
my own sipdialer package README) - is there any way to help people avoid
getting stuck on issues like this?

Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?

Message #21 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>

To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>, 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 20:58:12 +0200

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 20:33 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
> Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?

This changed between squeeze and wheezy.

Cheers,
-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-

Message #26 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 22:27:36 +0200

On 02/05/14 20:58, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 20:33 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>> Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?
> 
> This changed between squeeze and wheezy.
> 


Still doesn't work for iceweasel or icedove though

I created a desktop entry sipdialer.desktop and I edited
.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list adding:

[Added Associations]
...
...
x-scheme-handler/tel=sipdialer.desktop;



Now, if I click the tel: URI in a web page or in the icedove address
book (using xul-ext-tbdialout) the "Launch Application" popup appears -
and there is no default option for me to choose.  I would expect to see
the "sipdialer" option in the popup.  Instead, it just has a "Choose"
button that opens a filesystem browser.

I can successfully launch the URI from the command line using commands
like these:

 gvfs-open tel:+442071234567

 xdg-open tel:+442071234567

and it also works from Chromium now.  Just not from iceweasel or icedove.

Message #31 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: refuses to use tel URIs

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 22:38:07 +0200

On 02/05/14 22:27, Daniel Pocock wrote:
> 
> 
> On 02/05/14 20:58, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>> Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 20:33 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>>> Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?
>>
>> This changed between squeeze and wheezy.
>>
> 
> 
> Still doesn't work for iceweasel or icedove though
> 
> I created a desktop entry sipdialer.desktop and I edited
> .local/share/applications/mimeapps.list adding:
> 
> [Added Associations]
> ...
> ...
> x-scheme-handler/tel=sipdialer.desktop;
> 
> 
> 
> Now, if I click the tel: URI in a web page or in the icedove address
> book (using xul-ext-tbdialout) the "Launch Application" popup appears -
> and there is no default option for me to choose.  I would expect to see
> the "sipdialer" option in the popup.  Instead, it just has a "Choose"
> button that opens a filesystem browser.
> 
> I can successfully launch the URI from the command line using commands
> like these:
> 
>  gvfs-open tel:+442071234567
> 
>  xdg-open tel:+442071234567
> 
> and it also works from Chromium now.  Just not from iceweasel or icedove.
> 
> 

The final comments in this issue also appear very similar:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748643

Message #38 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: another example

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 22:50:34 +0200

Another user having the same problem, only with Mozilla apps, with
x-scheme-handler:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=174245

Message #43 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: reassigning this bug

Date: Fri, 02 May 2014 23:26:46 +0200

This seems OK from Epiphany now but I'm not sure if the remaining issues
are just Mozilla bugs or some deeper problem with this whole change to
.desktop files.  Can you suggest where I should follow up on this and/or
reassign this bug?

Message #48 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>

To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.com.au>, 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: reassigning this bug

Date: Sat, 03 May 2014 00:31:35 +0200

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 23:26 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
> This seems OK from Epiphany now but I'm not sure if the remaining issues
> are just Mozilla bugs or some deeper problem with this whole change to
> .desktop files.  Can you suggest where I should follow up on this and/or
> reassign this bug?

MIME handling in Firefox is absolutely awful, so unfortunately I’m not
surprised by your findings. I think it’s safe to assume the problem is
limited to Mozilla products.

-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-

Message #57 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org, joss@debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: reassigning this bug

Date: Sat, 03 May 2014 08:03:27 +0200

On 03/05/14 00:31, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 23:26 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
>> This seems OK from Epiphany now but I'm not sure if the remaining issues
>> are just Mozilla bugs or some deeper problem with this whole change to
>> .desktop files.  Can you suggest where I should follow up on this and/or
>> reassign this bug?
> 
> MIME handling in Firefox is absolutely awful, so unfortunately I’m not
> surprised by your findings. I think it’s safe to assume the problem is
> limited to Mozilla products.
> 

Thanks for the feedback - I've now reassigned the bug to iceweasel

I still think it is crazy that the gconftool-2 utility is still present
and still appears to work when invoked by the user.  This is a waste of
time for people.  If it is no longer relevant, it should have been
removed or it should display an error when people try to use it to
configure these handlers.

Message #68 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>

To: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>, 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: Re: Bug#746707: reassigning this bug

Date: Sat, 03 May 2014 18:58:32 +0200

Le samedi 03 mai 2014 à 08:03 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :
> I still think it is crazy that the gconftool-2 utility is still present
> and still appears to work when invoked by the user.

The GNOME team is an advocate of aggressively removing obsolete
packages, but in this case, there are still 151 packages using GConf in
unstable. Just because GNOME has migrated away from it doesn’t mean it
isn’t still widely used. It is even used as a GSettings backend by some
people who don’t like the faster binary format dconf uses.

-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-

Message #73 received at 746707@bugs.debian.org (full text, mbox, reply):

From: Daniel Pocock <daniel@pocock.pro>

To: 746707@bugs.debian.org

Subject: working in stretch / Firefox

Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2017 19:54:41 +0200

I've tested on stretch with
Firefox 52.2.0esr-1~deb9u1
Epiphany 3.22.7-1
Thunderbird 1:45.8.0-3
 (using xul-ext-tbdialout 1.7.2-1)

and I'm pleased to see it working, except for one unrelated tbdialout bug.

To test, I created /home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test:

#!/bin/bash

echo $1 >> /tmp/sipdialer.log




and ~/.local/share/applications/sipdialer.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=sipdialer
GenericName=Click to dial
Comment=Click to dial
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
TryExec=/home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test
Exec=/home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test %u
Terminal=false
Categories=System
Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/vlc.png
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/tel;



and also edited .local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

[Added Associations]
...
x-scheme-handler/tel=sipdialer.desktop
...




Then I ran "update-menus" and I was able to click a "tel" link in
Firefox and it launched ~/bin/sipdialer-test with the phone number as an
argument.

GNOME Evolution in stretch also supports the same handler now[1] and I
tested that too and it passes a similar URL to the handler.  That means
the same handler script (maybe sipdialer from reSIProcate or something
else) can handle the "tel:" URI (click-to-dial) from Firefox,
Thunderbird and Evolution.

One problem I noticed with tbdialout: it strips the leading "+" from the
phone number.  It is necessary to add it back in the plugin preferences,
under "Replace leading + with:", maybe it should be there by default as
it is non-intuitive what will happen when that field is blank.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729084

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