Zeroconf Service Discovery Applet Doesn't Handle Most Service Types

This worked fine on Dapper. The problem occurs for me in Feisty.

Daengbo:

  * which version of Ubuntu are you running and
  * what version of the service-discover-applet is installed?

For me I'm running Feisty and have 0.4.4-1ubuntu2

Running Feisty, Zeroconf Service Discovery 0.4.4-1ubuntu2. This is my
first time trying to use zeroconf, and I like it very much. I can't
wait until most everything works with it out of the box. It will be
beautiful.

Are you the package maintainer?

Thanks,
Dan

On 5/15/07, Dan Munckton <email address hidden> wrote:
> Daengbo:
>
> * which version of Ubuntu are you running and
> * what version of the service-discover-applet is installed?
>
> For me I'm running Feisty and have 0.4.4-1ubuntu2
>
> ** Changed in: service-discovery-applet (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: (unassigned) => Dan Munckton
> Status: Unconfirmed => Needs Info
>
> --
> Zeroconf Service Discovery Applet Doesn't Handle Most Service Types
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/112095
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

No, Sebastian Dröge is the maintainer.

It seems that when a service entry is clicked behind the scenes the applet delegates opening it to a series of plugins. As you'll have guessed from the error messages not all services have plugins implemented to work with them yet, e.g. printing. However it used to work fine for web sites in Dapper, and now in Feisty it doesn't.

It delegates opening of web URLs to Nautilus. E.g. for a local web site like http://myhost.local/ it will run the command:

  nautilus http://myhost.local/

If you replace the 'myhost' bit with a real hostname and run that command line in a shell you'll see the same error dialog:

  Couldn't display "http://myhost.local/".

  The location is not a folder.

Now looking at the deb src for the package it seems that this has been patched to work like this as the original code used the python call gnome.url_show(). I'm not sure why this is changed for ubuntu but if this doesn't work well enough a possible fix could be to use a tool like gnome-open or xdg-open instead of nautilus.

I'm going to mark this issue as confirmed. Although maybe this is really more than one issue: on the one hand we have a regression in terms of functionality cause it no longer opens advertised web sites, but developing plugins for other services is adding new features.

Yeah, I agree. My main complaint was that the web site wouldn't open,
when it obviously should be able to do that if we use the "Connect"
dialog. The other issues are definitely related, as I think it
shouldn't involve "writing a plugin" as much as defining the program
which used the passed URL. I'll look into the SSH and Nautilus
plugins, though, and see if I can work out how to do a basic plugin
(it will have no error checking or graceful failure because I'm not a
real programmer.

I'm not sure what to do about NFS, though. Nautilus doesn't currently
have any method to handle it and fuse doesn't have a plugin, as far as
I know. I guess NFS isn't that popular anymore. We should definitely
look into an all-*nix file sharing method for Zeroconf, though.

Thanks for confirming this.

Dan

On 5/15/07, Dan Munckton <email address hidden> wrote:
> No, Sebastian Dröge is the maintainer.
>
> It seems that when a service entry is clicked behind the scenes the
> applet delegates opening it to a series of plugins. As you'll have
> guessed from the error messages not all services have plugins
> implemented to work with them yet, e.g. printing. However it used to
> work fine for web sites in Dapper, and now in Feisty it doesn't.
>
> It delegates opening of web URLs to Nautilus. E.g. for a local web site
> like http://myhost.local/ it will run the command:
>
> nautilus http://myhost.local/
>
> If you replace the 'myhost' bit with a real hostname and run that
> command line in a shell you'll see the same error dialog:
>
> Couldn't display "http://myhost.local/".
>
> The location is not a folder.
>
> Now looking at the deb src for the package it seems that this has been
> patched to work like this as the original code used the python call
> gnome.url_show(). I'm not sure why this is changed for ubuntu but if
> this doesn't work well enough a possible fix could be to use a tool like
> gnome-open or xdg-open instead of nautilus.
>
> I'm going to mark this issue as confirmed. Although maybe this is really
> more than one issue: on the one hand we have a regression in terms of
> functionality cause it no longer opens advertised web sites, but
> developing plugins for other services is adding new features.
>
> ** Changed in: service-discovery-applet (Ubuntu)
> Assignee: Dan Munckton => (unassigned)
> Status: Needs Info => Confirmed
>
> --
> Zeroconf Service Discovery Applet Doesn't Handle Most Service Types
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/112095
> You received this bug notification because you are a direct subscriber
> of the bug.
>

Current gutsy version 0.4.4-2 still exhibits this same problem. The background info on why nautilus.py plugin was patched to execute nautilus directly is here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/service-discovery-applet/+bug/96433