In bz#123349, we hard-coded a dependency on the htmlview package. Which in turn drags in these additional deps: pinfo -> htmlview -> redhat-menus -> desktop-file-utils But this is inappropriate on minimalist/console-only systems that need no X11/desktop crap. One idea would be to create another soft dep called "htmlviewer" (much like lynx already provides "webclient"). Then of course, both lynx and htmlview (and even elinks) would have to be rebuilt to provide "htmlviewer". But this doesn't solve the proper editing of the *VIEWER options /etc/pinforc. So maybe some sort of alternatives setup is needed? But that seems way to complex. What is the *VIEWER code really used for anyways and how important is it to the core pinfo/pman functionality?
Whoops, proper link to Bug 123349 and adding original author.
I think it would be good to use xdg-open from xdg-utils. It offers the same functionality as htmlview but also groks KDE and XFCE users' settings in addition to GNOME (and does have a console fallback mode), and doesn't have a problematic dependency chain. Also, the default MAILEDITOR could be set to xdg-email (also in the xdg-utils package).
xdg-utils solves the redhat-menus dep, but still clings to desktop-file-utils which is still not appropriate for a non-X11 system.
True, but FWIW, in my opinion desktop-file-utils is nothing to worry about, it's a ~110kB package and the only "extra" dependency in it is glib2 which I don't think can be realistically removed from a working Fedora setup anyway. OTOH, I wouldn't object to the dependency being removed altogether - but even without the dependency, IMO using xdg-utils if it's available would be a better choice than htmlview.
Ok, htmlview is replaced with xdg-open and xdg-email in pinfo-0.6.9-5.fc8. Do you want to have this also in F7 updates? (I'd prefer to not change the default values this late in F7)