528683 - OSX with "cmdline" options works different as on other platforms

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Thunderbird :: OS Integration, defect)

Description

[Günter]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: see below for WINxp and MAC/OSX

Following https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Chrome/Command_Line
our XPI has implemented some cmdline options. The implementation works well with WINxp and Ubuntu9.10, but fails with MAC OSX. 
On OSX a first call with "thunderbird -reminderfox {remoteID} -msgString {details for op}" works as expected (and similar to other platforms), but any further call (as long as OSX has a running instance of TB) will fail.
An error dialog comes up using:
restartMessageNoUnlockerMac=A copy of %S is already open. Only one copy of %S can be open at a time.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

2.
3.
Actual Results:  
Error Dialog
restartMessageNoUnlockerMac=A copy of %S is already open. Only one copy of %S can be open at a time.

Expected Results:  
Should do same as on other platforms, pass the parameters to the running instance to get processed.

Implementing features on an extension level using low level calls should behave equal on all gecko supported platforms.

Comment 1

[Günter]

Sorry, forgot to post the ID strings

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; de; rv:1.8.1.23) Gecko/20090812 Thunderbird/2.0.0.23
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de; rv:1.9.1.4pre) Gecko/20090915 Thunderbird/3.0b4

Comment 2

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Indeed, mac uses the OS dock/applevents mechanisms to avoid running multiple instances. You cannot launch the executable twice from the command line.

Comment 3

[Günter]

Resolved/Invalid isn't the right answer!

As said to have a consistent behavior from an application/extension POV, a solution for the MAC/OSX situation is required. If OSX doesn't allow to pass another set of parameters for an additional operation, we need to have a different method here.

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

That launching a second instance remotes to the first isntance works on Windows/Linux is an artifact of the way shell integration works on those OSes. I don't think that consistency is so important that we need to "fix" it in this way. You're welcome to implement a better way of handling apple events, though I think that they end up passing through the command-line handlers now as -file and -url arguments.