296363 - x-remote doesn't aware hostname or IP

Status: REOPENED

(Toolkit :: Startup and Profile System, defect, P5)

Description

[Ginn Chen]

1) Consider we have 2 machines, HostA and HostB, both have a user with the same name.
2) Open a terminal in HostA, telnet to HostB in it and set DISPLAY to HostA:0.0, start mozilla on HostB
3) Open another terminal in HostA, try to start mozilla

Expected Result: mozilla on HostA starts.

Actual Result: The remote displayed mozilla on HostB opens a new navigator window.

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This has bitten me badly a few times.  Could we possibly fix this?

Comment 2

[Darin Fisher]

Isn't this working as designed?  Perhaps MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 is the answer?

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Isn't this working as designed?

The point is that the design is bad, imo.

MOZ_NO_REMOTE is a workaround, but I see the basic behavior as wrong.

Comment 4

[Darin Fisher]

Hmm... one could argue that the current design is nice.  For example, if I have
tbird running on one system and ffox running on another, but both are displayed
on the same X display, then it is sort of nifty that I can click on links in
tbird and have them render in the running instance of ffox.

Comment 5

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

I agree that it's nice in that case, but if I'm explicitly attempting to start
firefox on some system, then it's odd to instead create a new window of an
existing instance.

Perhaps those should be different modes of operation for x-remote?  That is,
have an xremote flag that allows or disallows searching for things from other
machines and set it appropriately?

Comment 6

[Darin Fisher]

Yeah, if we were to "fix" x-remote to only communicate with processes on the
same X-client, then it would probably be a trivial addition to make that
restriction optional.

Comment 7

[Eric]

I concur that this behavior is counter-intuitive and thus confusing.  It continually causes me trouble.

Comment 9

[Kondala Rao]

Please let me is there any way to get a patch on this problem???

Comment 10

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Mass resolving a bunch of old bugs in the x-remote component in preparation for archiving it. If this bug is still valid and useful, please move it to the "Toolkit: Startup and Profile System" component and reopen it.