1305218 - Add method to get standard input from command line

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Manuel Grießmayr]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:49.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/49.0
Build ID: 20160920074044

Steps to reproduce:

I want to do something like 
cat body.htm | thunderbird -compose

Comment 1

[Manuel Grießmayr]

Attachment: stdinput.patch

The patch attached is a first idea how to implement the API for it.

Comment 2

[Manuel Grießmayr]

I got the idea for it when working on this enhancement:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=882104

Comment 3

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

Comment on attachment 8794482 [details] [diff] [review]
stdinput.patch

I'm no longer a Thunderbird contributor or reviewer.  Having said that, your patch makes a change to Gecko, not Thunderbird-specific code, so Thunderbird reviewers can't approve it either.  Also, I'm very confident this change wouldn't be accepted into Gecko core since it's synchronous IO on the main thread not using the existing IO APIs.

I don't think the appshells close stdin, so you can probably use existing (async) API's on the existing stdin file descriptor or something like that.  I'd expect there's existing code out there that does something similar if you're wedded to this command-line workflow.

Comment 4

[Manuel Grießmayr]

We actually implemented this enhancement synchronously:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=882104
So we would need a synchronous solution again.

Comment 5

[Manuel Grießmayr]

Also, I would like to call the code within Javascript.

Comment 6

[Kent James (:rkent)]

The Thunderbird command line handler additions are done in Javascript, which means that mail reviewers could review them, and also that they could possibly be overridden by an extension. Have you looked at, for example, https://dxr.mozilla.org/comm-central/source/mail/components/nsMailDefaultHandler.js ?

I'm a little late to this bug and maybe I'm completely offbase here.