[Bf-committers] url handlers / help-system / *nix

[Daniel Fairhead]

Hi all,

I've been thinking and looking into adding documentation links from the
help menu. A very simple project which I should be able to do :-)

All it has to do is launch the default browser at either an online URL, or a
html file on the system.

As far as I have done so far, it is very easy on windows (two/three lines (besides
the blender events/menu code)). 

Unfortunatly, other OSes (*NIX) don't have an official standard way of knowing
what the default browser is.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/BROWSER/

seems like a Good Solution, using a $BROWSER environment variable and then 
needs only 3 lines again. I do not know how many distros/systems support this by default
though.

I have also found a way of finding out the gnome http URL handler using gconf. The
code to do this though is quite ugly and large (20+ lines). I could also write some 
semi-smart code which goes searching in common places for common browsers, and call 
them... but this is also very in-elegant.

I could also add a user-pref for which browser, but this seems far far over the top,
ugly, and silly. I really dislike this though.

So, should I just do the $BROWSER one (my prefered) and if $BROWSER isn't set 
pop up a message saying "please set your $BROWSER variable for Help to work...", 
or should I write loads of ugly hacky code to try and find clever defaults to use
if $BROWSER isn't set?

Sorry if this seems trivial...

Dan