291426 - Choosing a helper app should not resolve symlinks

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 176486

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Martijn Pieters]

When opening an attachment you can select a helper app with the 'Other'
drop-down option ('Open with'). This option brings up a file picker and you can
navigate to an executable that will be passed the path to the temporary file
holding the attachment.

If you pick a symlink, Thunderbird will resolve that symlink and use the target
of that symlink as the helper app. This breaks those applications that rely on
the name by which it was executed. For example, VIM uses several symlinks to
modify it's behaviour. Executing it through the '/usr/bin/gview' symlink for
example, will open VIM in GUI mode and treat files as read-only. However, by
resolving the symlink, thunderbird will always use the path '/usr/bin/vim',
which requires a terminal to run, which in my case it'll bail out due to the
lack of a terminal.

The current workaround is to create a shell-script for such symlinked programs
and use that as the helper app instead, but this is, as you can imagine, a pain.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

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