253148 - "Open with" when opening a file resolves symlinks which is bad

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 176486

(Toolkit :: Downloads API, defect)

Description

[Tomas Ögren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.9.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040719 Firefox/0.9.1

When opening some text file or something that triggers an "Opening xyz" dialog
.. "You have chosen to open [..] which is a : [..] from: [..]" "What should
Firefox do with this file" ..
In this case, I wanted to open the text file with gvim (graphical vim, text
editor) so I chose "Other" in the "Open with" and picked /usr/bin/gvim which is
a symbolic link to /usr/bin/vim. Firefox then thought "vim" is what I want. When
vim starts, it checks how it is executed.. as "vim" or "gvim" (etc). If "gvim",
it starts the graphical version and if "vim" it's the text mode version
requiring a terminal. Since Firefox thought it knew better than me, I couldn't
open this file since Firefox provided no terminal for the poor vim editor.

The correct solution would be to leave symlinks alone. If a user points at the
file /blah/bleh, that's exactly what the user wanted.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Get an "You have chosen to open ..." dialog
2. Select "Other" under "Open with"
3. Point at a symbolic link, notice that Firefox checks where the symlink points
and uses that instead.

Actual Results:  
Firefox launched the terminal-less vim editor instead of the GUI editor gvim
that I picked.

Expected Results:  
Left my symlink alone and started gvim.

Comment 1

[Angelo]

confirming, same behaviour here

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040730 Firefox/0.9.1+

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 176486 ***