[Gramps-devel] Opening a URL

[John R. <jr...@ce...>]

Colleagues,

We use gramps.gui.display.display_url rather widely to open urls in either the htmlview plugin or the user's default browser. The latter is accomplished by first trying (1) to use xdg-open or its equivalent on other platforms, then (2) trying webbrowser.open(), and (3) finally to attempt to open directly a rather short list of specific browsers by name. 

My beef with this is that (2) also does (1) and (3), except with a much longer list of browsers. Since webbrowser is part of the Python Standard Library, it's maintained by the Python maintainers and is likely to be more portable and more current than anything we do.

I propose to simplify display_url() to try the htmlview plugin and fall back only to webbrowser.open. Any objections or concerns?

Regards,
John Ralls