From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041215 Firefox/1.0 Red Hat/1.0-12.EL4 Description of problem: When no browser is up, trying to open an URL using htmlview brings up an unexpected page and it does not return. Please note that RHEL3 htmlview returns immediately with this error: Error: No running window found. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. make sure no browser is launched 2. run 'htmlview -remote "openURL(http://www.redhat.com)"' Actual Results: 1. it returns an error: /usr/bin/htmlview: line 75: [: -remote: binary operator expected 2. it brings up a default browser with the default initial page (note: not the page specified in the original command line "http://www.redhat.com") Expected Results: Either of these: 1) as being done on RHEL3 htmlview, return immediately with an appropriate error or 2) display the specified URL Additional info:
FYI: rpm -q htmlview htmlview-3.0.0-8
Where did you hear about the "-remote" option of htmlview? htmlview since version 2.x contained the following. # ignore legacy cruft if [ "$1" == "--remote" ]; then shift elif [ "$1" == "--local" ]; then shift fi AFAIK "-remote" was never supported, and it would be passed to a browser and that is the reason why you are seeing strange effects by using it. --remote would be ignored these days because X remote capable browsers handle it in their own launch scripts automatically. This bug should be closed NOTABUG, however if we have bad documentation somewhere that mentions either -remote or --remote it should be corrected. Where did you hear about this option?
We are not referring to the "--remote" option of htmlview, but Mozilla's "-remote" option. Mozilla's "-remote" option allows you to connect to a running browser process instead of starting a new one. You can find out about it here: http://www.mozilla.org/unix/remote.html
I should also mention that the problem seems to be with the mimic_gnome_open function of htmlview. It seems to mess up the options that should just be getting passed through to the browser. This worked fine in htmlview 2.x, which didn't have the mimic_gnome_open functionality.
What I'm saying is that passing -remote is totally not necessary because the browser launcher itself is supposed to handle exactly that behavior automatically. That is not the case?
I added '-remote' as a parameter that FC4 htmlview will ignore. htmlview is not meant to pass additional options to browsers. One shouldn't expect it to work either, because htmlview can be used to launch *any* browser which is configured in Preferred Applications, which could be konqueror, opera or even elinks. Proposing this for RHEL4U2 mainly due to the fix in Bug #92335 which is more important. Justification: 1) htmlview changes since RHEL4 are trivial and obviously correct. 2) Fixes from Bug #92335 correct a clearly wrong and confusing behavior.
We worked around not to use '-remote' in Directory Server 7.1 (on RHEL3 U4 and RHEL4). We stop using the utility in the future version. Thank you for your support. To close this bug, to which value I should change the status?