132688 - consider MAILCAP and PERSONAL_MAILCAP environment variables

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core Graveyard :: Cmd-line Features, enhancement, P1)

Description

[Jim Gottlieb]

NS4 honored the MAILCAP and PERSONAL_MAILCAP environment varibles, yet Mozilla
does not.

I try to set MAILCAP in my wrapper script for all users to point to an
appropriate mailcap file.

Workaround: edit the appropriate fields in defaults/pref/unix.js .  However, I
believe that this has no effect once a user's profile has been created, while
with the environment variables I can easily change the settings for all users at
any time.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I'll take this.  In NS4, does the environment variable take precendence over the
preference setting?

Comment 2

[Jim Gottlieb]

Oops... I did some testing and I was wrong about NS4 honoring those environment
variables.  Other programs I work with honor MAILCAP (well, mutt uses MAILCAPS)
and when I saw MAILCAP and PERSONAL_MAILCAP (in all upper case) in the Netscape
binary I assumed it was a reference to environment variables, but in fact they
are keywords in NS4's preferences file.

Sorry 'bout that.  It still would be nice, though.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Sure.  But my question remains.  Do preference settings override these
environment variables, or the other way around?

The issue is that we want to ship with a default setup that works for most
people so we ship with those preferences pre-set....  Perhaps something like the
following logic?:

if (prefHasUserValue()) { // user has set this in prefs.js/user.js
 // use that value
} else if (env var set) {
 // use env var
} else { 
 // use default pref value from unix.js
}

Does that seem reasonable?

Comment 4

[Jim Gottlieb]

That looks right to me.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

1.1alpha is frozen.  Unsetting milestone and will retriage in a few days when I
can make a realistic assessment of the situation.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

patch in bug 136670 fixes this.

Comment 7

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

fixed by bug 136670 landing

Comment 8

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

rs vrfy.