Bug 252485 – Pidgin calls mozilla for online help

• Product: Gentoo Linux
• Status: RESOLVED NEEDINFO

[Description zifix 2008-12-25 15:34:07 UTC]

When pressing Help -> Online Help or F1 in Pidgin it seems to execute mozilla <url>. This lead due to the non-existance of a suiting executable to an error message.
I fixed this problem by creating the symlink ln -s /usr/bin/firefox /usr/bin/mozilla. It should rather be fixed by editing the source or automatically creating the symlink.
I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the program itsself or the patching on Gentoo's side, but it never occurred to me on other distros.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Make sure mozilla is not an executable
2.Start Pidgin
3.Press F1

Actual Results:  
An error message reporting the the execution of mozilla <url> fails.

Expected Results:  
Opening of http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/FAQ in the default browser (in my case firefox).

[Comment 1 Olivier Crete (RETIRED) 2008-12-26 07:27:00 UTC]

Here it works properly, I'm pretty certain that pidgin uses the Gnome default browser. Here it opens ffox just fine.

[Comment 2 zifix 2008-12-26 12:40:01 UTC]

Unable to open URL

The browser command "mozilla 'http://pidgin.im/documentation'" is invalid.

is the exact error.

net-im/pidgin-2.5.2
dbus doc gnutls gstreamer gtk ncurses networkmanager nls perl spell -bonjour -debug -eds -gadu -groupwise -meanwhile -prediction -qq -sasl -silc -tcl -tk -zephyr
my version and useflags

[Comment 3 zifix 2008-12-26 12:41:48 UTC]

Sry for the double post.
I'm not using gentoo but rather xfce and here the default-browser executable is xfce-base/xfce-utils's /usr/bin/xfbrowser4.

[Comment 4 zifix 2008-12-26 13:08:04 UTC]

Ok a little more testing and browsing through the source lead me to finding my browser setting in the preferences being switched to manual with an empty textbox for the user defined command.
Strangely it falls back to the command mentioned above, but that isn't what I'd have expected...