links browser irregularities


moxie

The voice of reason, sense and exasperation
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Since I've been working on the interesting task to try and write a readable read-me lately, I've come to the conclusion that links (that is, the rather minimal web browser, not hyperlinks or anything like that) is acting weird.

My original problem is this: Part of the documentation for my ported software is in PDF form. If this appears in links-as-it-is-given, it gives the user the choice to View (as text, that is as a bunch of almost-postscript code) or Download (from the pnd, to the SD card, or something). Neither is very good - The reasonable thing would be to open the document in evince or something similar. However, links does have an "associations" choice in the "Settings" menu, so I wrote myself an association from application/pdf to evince %. All is well and good, and when I actually remembered to "Save settings" it was repeatable between sessions, too. However, next time I opened up links to try another document, the association was gone again.

Shock and horror! However, when I tried to open "my" Readme, it suddenly worked again. A little bit of poking around made it clear that links is saving settings, bookmarks etc in the appdata directory of the calling pnd. So, if I look at my Readme from my pnd, links loads its settings from appdata/AltairZ80Moxie/.links/, whilst if I look at the Readme for, uh, btdun, it loads settings from appdata/btdun/.links/.

To me, this is weird. This means that if you have a setting you'd like (for instance, an association), you need to make it again and again for every time you want to use it. On the other hand, it means that it is actually possible for me to supply specific links settings for my PND? Interesting. Not necessarily good, possibly, though. Or is it?

So, my general questions goes something like this:

* Is this actually the desired links behaviour? If it isn't, could it be fixed in a future update?

* Regardless of the above: Could we get a standard association in the preinstalled links from application/pdf to evince % in a future update?
 
The problem seems related to the set location of HOME directory... links store it's settings there, but PNDs while runnging changes it to their appdata folder.

Maybe you can open links (standalone) and modify it's settings as you want, save them and then delete all the .links directories in the various appdata folders.

The next time that links is started by a PND it should save it's "current" configuration on the appdata, so it should now contain the pdf reference even there.
 
Except that it would then be looking for the existing configuration in appdata, so would always load with default settings, not the defaults you set when starting it as standalone application (which would be saved in $HOME on the NAND)

- Neelix
 
I was guessing that it was starting with the appdata home still not set... Actually I don't know how it is launched, should give a look
 
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