Gnus<->Netscape mailcap strangeness

Gnus<->Netscape mailcap strangeness

[Graham Todd]

Pterodactyl Gnus v0.98 on XEmacs 20.4 (i386-pc-linux)

After upgrading from 0.96 to 0.98 I started to have trouble viewing
attached images and files in newsgroups (and my own mail groups). 

If an image is small enough to fit in the Article buffer it displays
correctly but if an image is too large or there is no "native"
internal viewer for XEmacs for the attached file (eg. for MS Excel and
Word documents) a clickable widget appears (as it should) but when I
click on the widget (for say a JPEG file too large for the buffer) I
get the following minibuffer messages and no image or file viewer is
launched:

   Displaying x-mozilla-flags=internal...
   Viewing with x-mozilla-flags=internal

Recognizing this as possible Netscape Helper pollution in my
~/.mailcap file I removed the file and restarted XEmacs. Without the
~/.mailcap in place everything worked just fine for those file types
able to be displayed by XEmacs internally. Putting the file back in
place and doing "M-x mailcap-parse-mailcaps" would cause the same
errors But since my mailcap file contains lines like the following:

application/msword;/home/gtodd/bin/applixviewer %s

I was no longer able to click on buttons and have those viewers launch
to view the attachments.  The mailcap file sort of needs to be in
place so that I can browse directories in Netscape and click on files
and have the appropriate file viewer launch to viewer the file.  Sigh
... this is of course a necessary "convenience" because repositories
of shared files and files that are distributed publically by
government departments etc are often in MS-Word format (occasionally
PDF) - in any case it's more convenient to leave my ~/.mailcap in
place so that Netscape (and lynx for that matter) can function
correctly when clicking on URLs for Word, Excel documents and the
like.

Since mailcap parsing was not a problem in earlier versions of Gnus
perhaps something has changed in 0.98 that could "hacked" to correct
this on the gnus side.  Maybe mailcap-parse-mailcaps could be made to
skip the x-mozilla-flags lines or somehow correct what netscape is
doing to the .mailcap file. It seems that when viewing jpegs or pngs
Gnus is trying to use the lines in my mailcap that have been added by
Netscape to flag these file types as "internal".

I've placed my mailcap file here:

ftp://ftp.equilibrio.qc.ca/pub/GnusStuff/hold.mailcap

in case my problem is merely a local one. The file looks OK but gnus
doesn't seem to like it anymore.

Sorry this was so long-winded.

Regards,

-- 
G. Todd

Re: Gnus<->Netscape mailcap strangeness

[Shenghuo ZHU]

>>>>> "G" == Graham Todd <gtodd@yorku.ca> writes:

G> Pterodactyl Gnus v0.98 on XEmacs 20.4 (i386-pc-linux)

G> After upgrading from 0.96 to 0.98 I started to have trouble viewing
G> attached images and files in newsgroups (and my own mail groups). 

G> If an image is small enough to fit in the Article buffer it displays
G> correctly but if an image is too large or there is no "native"
G> internal viewer for XEmacs for the attached file (eg. for MS Excel and
G> Word documents) a clickable widget appears (as it should) but when I
G> click on the widget (for say a JPEG file too large for the buffer) I
G> get the following minibuffer messages and no image or file viewer is
G> launched:

G>    Displaying x-mozilla-flags=internal...
G>    Viewing with x-mozilla-flags=internal


[...]


G> I've placed my mailcap file here:

G> ftp://ftp.equilibrio.qc.ca/pub/GnusStuff/hold.mailcap

[...]

Fixed in 0.99.

-- 
Shenghuo