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Bug 498195 - Can't follow links to files on Windows shares
Can't follow links to files on Windows shares
Status: RESOLVED OBSOLETE
Product: evolution
Classification: Applications
Component: Mailer
2.26.x (obsolete)
Other All
: Normal enhancement
: ---
Assigned To: evolution-mail-maintainers
Evolution QA team
: 524278 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2007-11-19 14:24 UTC by Tom Chance
Modified: 2021-05-19 11:13 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: 2.25/2.26



Description Tom Chance 2007-11-19 14:24:02 UTC
Please describe the problem:
Colleagues often send emails with links to files on Windows shares, but clicking and ctrl+clicking on them doesn't do anything. If samba is installed it should try and open an equivalent smb:/ path, and if there is a Windows share set-up in GNOME in 'places' then it would ideally open the path from within there.

For example, an email might contain this hyperlink (either in plain text or HTML):

\\192.168.0.12\data\Fibres\The Laundry\document.doc

or

\\biofile\data\Fibres\The Laundry\document.doc

or

S:\Fibres\The Laundry\document.doc

I have mounted that shared folder (\\biofile\data) as "S" in GNOME and can certainly access the path smb://biofile/data/Fibres/The Laundry/document.doc

Steps to reproduce:
1. Receive an email with a link to a file on a shared drive
2. Try to access it


Actual results:
Nothing!

Expected results:
The file to open up.

Does this happen every time?
Yes.

Other information:
Comment 1 André Klapper 2007-11-20 09:35:37 UTC
\\192.168.0.12\data\Fibres\The Laundry\document.doc is not an URL.
Comment 2 Tom Chance 2007-11-20 09:47:40 UTC
How do you mean? Copy it into Explorer in Windows and it works just fine. Insert it as a hyperlink into an HTML email, open that in Windows and you can follow the link just fine.
Comment 3 Tom Chance 2007-11-20 13:44:13 UTC
Also, if done properly the hyperlink will be like this, which also doesn't work:

file://\\biofile\data\Fibres\The Laundry\document.doc
Comment 4 André Klapper 2007-11-20 14:31:15 UTC
yeah, "\" is not used in Linux. it's "/".
Comment 5 Tom Chance 2007-11-21 09:11:58 UTC
Yup, so this is a bit of an issue when people are using Evolution in a mixed-OS environment, or in my case where everyone else in the office is using Windows.

It would be nice if Evolution was, at the very least, able to recognise a Windows URL and interpret it as one that it can understand.

It would be brilliant if the integration was so slick that Evolution was aware of Samba's configuration (i.e. if it isn't available don't let them click the link, or give a useful error) and any drives mounted through Samba or GNOME's "connect to server" facility. When Evo notices that the link refers to a Windows URL that corresponds to one of these drives, it points directly there.
Comment 6 lloeki 2007-12-14 11:49:16 UTC
Agreed with Tom. Those are not URLs.

URLs are defined in http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html
URIs here http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt

That said, this could be implemented in a plugin, but I certainly don't want to see that kind of non-standard functionality on my desktop.
Comment 7 Jeremy Allison 2007-12-15 06:13:30 UTC
They might not be URL's but they're extremely useful to a user.

Gnome can handle SMB url's using libsmbclient, so why not add a handler to do this for a user ?

Here is an (expired) rfc draft on the format :

http://davenport.sourceforge.net/draft-crhertel-smb-url-07.txt

- the relevant section is here :

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
7. The Relationship Between the SMB URI and the UNC Format

   Some operating systems support a format known as Universal Naming
   Convention (UNC).  UNC is a means for identifying network resources.
   SMB is one of the protocols supported by UNC.

   In general, a UNC string specifying a resource available via SMB
   protocol can be converted into an SMB URI string by simply adding
   the "smb:" or "cifs:" prefix and reversing the direction of all of
   the separating slashes.  For example:

   UNC form                          URI form
   -------------------------------   -----------------------------------
   \\corgis\docs\                    smb://corgis/docs/
   \\corgis\docs\jolyon\             smb://corgis/docs/jolyon/
   \\corgis\docs\jolyon\rabbit.txt   smb://corgis/docs/jolyon/rabbit.txt
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just prepend smb: when you see a '\\' prefix pathname and convert '\' to '/' and hand to the Gnome VFS.

It's very clever to quote "this is not a URL" back at a poor user, but the fact remains that Windows gives this functionality and right now Gnome doesn't, so let's just quietly fix it for him please.

Jeremy.
Comment 8 Joel Goguen 2009-03-18 16:40:24 UTC
This has been reported for Evolution in Ubuntu at https://launchpad.net/bugs/280389
Comment 9 André Klapper 2009-03-18 17:42:48 UTC
More interesting then the link to Launchpad was your comment over there:

"This is also a problem for Evolution 2.25.92-0ubuntu1. If you receive an email with links in either form (\\server\path\to\file and smb://server/path/to/file), Evolution does not display them as links. They are displayed simply as plain text."

Updating version number.
Comment 10 André Klapper 2012-01-20 10:08:35 UTC
*** Bug 524278 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 11 André Klapper 2021-05-19 11:13:05 UTC
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. 
As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org
which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately
quite limited so not every ticket can get handled).

If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent
and supported software version, then please follow
  https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines
and create a new enhancement request ticket at
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/

Thank you for your understanding and your help.