djbclark@tux:~/gnupure$ fossil ui gnupure.fossil-scm
sh: firefox: not found
(hangs)

It would be good if fossil had a built-in list of web browsers to search for in the user's $PATH. Debian, Ubuntu, gNewSense, and probably other .deb-based GNU/Linux distributions have the concept of the alternatives system - "x-www-browser" exists, which the user can set to be whatever they want, but usually has a sane default. So IMHO a good order to try would be:

x-www-browser icecat iceweasel firefox konqueror dillo www-browser elinks links2 links-hacked links w3m lynx

Reasoning: If x-www-browser exists, it should be what the user wants to use. If icecat exists, it is most likely because the user has made a choice to use it, as it's not default in any distros I know of. If iceweasel exists, firefox probably doesn't, as it is usually just in Debian instead of firefox. Next, firefox, then if that doesn't exist, try KDE's browser, konqueror, and then dillo, a lightweight browser which is the only option on some USB/CD bootable distributions. If none of those exist, the user may be on a box without X-Windows; try www-browser, which should be what the user wants to use, followed by the web browsers that can do full-screen GUI to frame buffer, elinks, links2, links-hacked, and links, followed by text-only web browsers, w3m and lynx.

drh added on 2009-04-18 19:21:49:
If you can suggest code for linux that finds the users preferred webbrowser, I would really like to see it. The web browser selection already works well in OSX (it invokes "open") and in windows (where it invokes "start"). But the linux web browser selection logic is lacking.

Note, however, that as a work-around, you can say:

fossil setting web-browser WHATEVER -global

Do the above once, and be forevermore happy.

anonymous claiming to be lRem added on 2009-04-20 15:06:10:
You could just use:

kfmclient exec 'http://lrem.net'

anonymous claiming to be lRem added on 2009-04-20 15:10:52:
The GNOME counterpart is:

gnome-open 'http://lrem.net/'

bharder added on 2009-04-21 18:32:14:
Both would fail in my normal circumstance, as I run niether Gnome or KDE; I think this is drh's point; there really is not a standard *nix way of doing this.

drh added on 2009-04-21 19:16:39:
Some code that would try various things until it found one that worked, would be nice. I eagerly await your suggestions :-)

anonymous claiming to be lRem added on 2009-07-08 18:47:08:
After a bit of research I found out that there already is an universal solution. It's called xdg-open. It is present in every Linux system with Firefox on board I have access to at this moment. So all you have to do is call:

xdg-open http://lrem.net/

If you still want some code that keeps falling back until it finds something I can just write that. But I personally don't believe that we need such boilerplate.

drh added on 2009-07-08 19:41:01:
xdg-open does not exist on my SuSE system - my primary desktop on which I do most SQLite and Fossil development.

I think what we really need here is a little subroutine that tries several different commands to launch the web browser, and keeps trying until it finds one that works. Perhaps "xdg-open" is what it tries first, but "firefox" needs to be on the list somewhere. What else do we try?

drh added on 2009-07-29 13:10:22:
See check-in 3a7e3e427d19e9b1ab1c4d8017d53c5a58122091