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wangp / bower

A curses terminal client for the Notmuch email system
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Temporary file gets deleted too soon? #100

Open haasn opened 2 years ago

haasn commented 2 years ago

I often find myself opening certain HTML emails in the browser, with "xdg-open&". I noticed that there is some delay (around a second) before the browser tab actually gets opened. (Only for these emails, for some reason) When this happens, bower has usually already deleted the temporary file by the time xdg-open has identified the file and forwarded it to the browser.

Obviously, the real bug here is that "xdg-open" takes too long on these files, for unknown reasons. But I think it's still bad UX from the side of bower for me to have to wait for the attachment to finish opening at all, before I can press away the message.

I think it would be better for bower to keep them around, either for a set amount of time, or until program exit. (I don't usually keep my mail client open when I'm not expecting mail, personally)

haasn commented 2 years ago

It seems to be reproducible with practically any HTML file:

$ echo '<html><body>Example</body></html>' > example
$ time xdg-open example
xdg-open example  0.48s user 0.13s system 102% cpu 0.599 total
$ time firefox example
firefox example  0.05s user 0.02s system 73% cpu 0.101 total

So it definitely is an xdg-open bug as well.

haasn commented 2 years ago

Another possible solution:

Add the possibility of detecting HTML MIME types (text/html) and opening them with the open_url command instead of the open_part command by default. Then I can just point open_url at firefox& and circumvent xdg-open.

wangp commented 2 years ago

A simple solution is to defer deleting all temporary files until we leave the thread view. I've mocked it up on the defer-rm-temp branch.

A question is when opening a part with a foreground command, i.e. without a trailing &, should the temporary file be deleted as soon as the command returns. That assumes the command only returns once the user is done viewing the part, which I guess would not be true if you use xdg-open to launch a web browser. On the other hand, email parts are small and keeping them around for a little longer doesn't really hurt.