Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 13:19:59 -0500 From: Eric S. Raymond esr@thyrsus.com To: editors@linuxtoday.com Subject: What comes after PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR? What comes after the classic Unix environment variables PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR? Why, 'BROWSER', of course -- an environment variable that informs programs of the user's preferred web bowser for launching URLs. My latest experiment in hacking social systems is to find out whether the open-source community can successfully manage to adopt a standard that requires small but coordinated changes to possibly as many as several dozen projects in order to make it really effective. I've written, tested, and submitted patches to Gnu Emacs, Python, and urlview(1) that make them aware of the new BROWSER environment variable. I have also submitted a patch for the Linux environ(5) manual page. Widely publicizing that I'm doing all this is also an essential part of the experiment. How far will this meme spread? Can we bootstrap a new standard environment variable into existence at this late date in Unix's evolution? There's a BROWSER project page at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/BROWSER/. There, I will log reports of BROWSER support being folded into other programs that must call browsers. -- Eric S. Raymond
Eric S. Raymond: What comes after PAGER, MAILER, and EDITOR?
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