Bug 701542

Summary:	alpine cannot open attachments
Product:	[Fedora] Fedora	Reporter:	Dirk Hoffmann <hoffmann>
Component:	xdg-utils	Assignee:	Steve Cossette <farchord>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:	Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
Severity:	high	Docs Contact:
Priority:	unspecified
Version:	rawhide	CC:	ecdpalma, jhhaynes, pertusus, rdieter
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
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Clone Of:		Environment:
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oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Dirk Hoffmann 2011-05-03 07:25:38 UTC

I would like to draw your attention to a bug which is present in the default installation of (at least) FC 12 to 14 when using gnome as DE and alpine as email client.
Description of problem:
The mailer program "alpine" is configured by default to delegate opening of HTTP-references to Firefox (or the gnome default browser) and xdg-open for attachments (HTTP files, but also images, PDF, ...). After a standard installation alpine saves a copy of the file to be displayed as /tmp/img-*, but when it comes to the *final*) delegate application (xdg-open delegates to gnome-open, which delegates *finally* to eog, acroread etc.), the tempfile has already disappeared. An file-missing error is reported by the application. Apparently "alpine" waits for the delegate (It sees only xdg-open!) to stop/SIGCHLD, then removes the tempfile before the final delegates comes to open it.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
It is more than a single version, but the defaults of FC 12 - FC 14 (at least) show this behaviour.

More details (May 2009):
 http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2009-March/069261.html
It actually mentions FC 10 showing this problem. (I did not check this version.)

Workaround (April 2011):
 http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2011-April/396172.html

Expected results:
Establish correct (SIGCHLD / wait?) communication between the delegates (xdg-open, gnome-open) and their callers.

Additional info:
gnome-open is in libgnome-2.16.0-6.el5
xdg-open is in xdg-utils
I cannot identify if only one of them needs to be corrected, but I cannot indicate both components in this bug report form.

Comment 1 Rex Dieter 2011-05-04 16:52:16 UTC

Variant of existing bug #653249 (mutt) .

See also upstream,
http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32016

Comment 2 Dirk Hoffmann 2013-03-10 20:21:44 UTC

Please note that this is still valid for FC17!!!

Comment 3 Jim Haynes 2013-10-05 22:58:23 UTC

And still exists in F19

Comment 4 Rex Dieter 2013-10-06 01:01:15 UTC

See bug #653249 for some workarounds

Comment 5 Fedora Admin user for bugzilla script actions 2025-07-23 01:44:34 UTC

This package has changed maintainer in Fedora. Reassigning to the new maintainer of this component.

Comment 6 Dirk Hoffmann 2025-08-29 17:32:35 UTC

The problem is less annoying (in FC37), as attachments can be displayed nowadays. The program spawning the viewer seems to survivec for some time. However, after some tens of seconds, the tempfile still disappears, and there is practically no time to properly save the file before. 

I am not sure, this can be solved by the sole contribution of the alpine manager, as it is a matter of interaction and delegation for viewing among several applications/packages.