Bug 50057

Summary:	SciTE help application hard coded to netscape
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Steve Garcia <sgarcia>
Component:	Current packages	Assignee:	Gentoo Linux bug wranglers <bug-wranglers>
Status:	RESOLVED INVALID
Severity:	normal
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Steve Garcia 2004-05-04 18:26:17 UTC

If you bring up SciTE and click on any help option, a message pane opens and the command line "netscape "file:///usr/share/scite/SciTEDoc.html" comes up, followed by an error message indicating that netscape was not found.  I imagine that everything would be fine if you had netscape installed.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.



Expected Results:  
My workaround was to create a symlink pointing netscape to mozilla.  Then all
was well.

I don't know whether the symlink is the best fix, or a way to configure the app
runtime or at compile time is best.  In any case, a hardcoded choice of a
deprecated browser is probably not the best option.

Comment 1 Ghislain Bourgeois 2004-05-04 19:26:39 UTC

Netscape is not hard coded. You can change it by looking at /usr/share/scite/SciTEGlobal.properties

This is not a bug.

Hysteric

Comment 2 Martin Holzer (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2004-05-06 00:31:04 UTC

see comment #1

Comment 3 Steve Garcia 2004-05-07 12:37:23 UTC

If a feature is unusable out of the box, it is a bug.  It's a bug the user can work around (after tracking it down), and it's a bug that you may have chosen not to fix, but it's still a bug.

The existence and location of the global options file is clearly explained in help.  Oh but wait, the help isn't available because it's set to use a program that is no longer commonly installed.

Yeah, SciTE is primarily a programmer's editor, and a programmer should be smart enough to track down where the settings are stored.  But that's a sorry excuse for ignoring a bad design when it would be trivial to fix.

A rational fix would be to change the default to something that might be likely to exist on a modern system, like mozilla or <shudder> epiphany.  Even better would be a config item in some sort of a standard location (/etc/conf.d maybe?)  Gentoo commonly adjusts default settings to match they way Gentoo is normally set up.  This just makes sense.

Fix it or not.  I'm not the maintainer.  But don't try to claim "It's not a bug."