[Users] Firefox and Claws Mail

[Michael Schwendt]

On Wed, 22 May 2013 22:57:32 +0200, Michael Schwendt wrote:

> Found an older thread about the same subject in the archives (Feb 2013).
> [ http://lists.claws-mail.org/pipermail/users/2013-February/thread.html#5421 ]
> 
> To rehash, Fedora's /usr/bin/firefox shell script overrides $TMPDIR
> with either $MOZ_TMPDIR, if set, or else with a hardcoded /var/tmp.
> This breaks Claws Mail's prohibit_duplicate_launch() feature.
> 
> I wonder, has anyone reported this to Fedora actually?
> 
> There has been a bug report for Claws Mail recently:
>   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/956380
> 
> When I found the culprit, I tracked down when and why the Firefox wrapper
> script was changed:  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/867073
> 
> Before that, it had hardcoded TMPDIR to /var/tmp, whereas the system
> (e.g. GNOME Shell) defaults to /tmp. That would have broken Claws Mail
> in the same way.
> 
> Overriding TMPDIR like that is insane, IMO.
> 
> And because I'm curious, would $HOME/.claws-mail/tmp not be appropriate?

Meanwhile, Fedora /usr/bin/firefox respects $TMPDIR if set. That's a
work-around for users who know about this and do set $TMPDIR.

That doesn't help us much with regard to this issue. If $TMPDIR is not set
when Claws Mail is started, it will fall back to using /tmp. When
launching Claws Mail from within Firefox, /var/tmp will be used instead.

To complicate the matter, Claws Mail uses g_get_tmp_dir() which reads
the env vars TMPDIR, TMP, TEMP (in that order), so there's more opportunity
to break.