GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 341903
trailing slash stripped from URI when clicking a .desktop link
Last modified: 2015-06-23 15:47:14 UTC
Let's create the following foo.desktop file on the desktop: [Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Encoding=UTF-8 Name=Foo Type=Link URL=http://toto.org/blop/ Icon=gnome-fs-bookmark When double-clicking on the resulting icon, the "http://toto.org/blop" URI is loaded in the browser, with the trailing slash removed. This can be an issue with some web sites that don't rewrite it.
Still happening in August 2009 using whatever version of Gnome is included with Debian 5.0 (Lenny). This *is* an issue because the URI loaded is *not* the specified URI. It is not safe (nor sane) to assume anything about the configuration of any particular webserver, optional Apache mod_rewite configurations included. FFS, why does this software do *something* *different* than what I told it to do?!?! This is the sort of bug that makes software *unusable* (it appears to "not work") and forces users to switch to something else... ...yes, forces users to switch. Imagine trying to configure a corporate desktop and include a link in /etc/skel/Desktop/, but the trailing slash always gets stripped off. Yes, you could change the link to specify "firefox http://toto.org/blop/" instead, but that would be making the assumption that all users will be using Firefox.
It says URL in the file, but the system seems to convert it into an URI somewhere. So maybe http URI's can't end in slashes?
You're right, it shouldn't strip the trailing slash. Presumably it does this because an URL with a trailing slash doesn't 'really' point to anything. But on the web it _should_ display the default document or a directory listing.
I can't reproduce this with nautilus 3.6. If the URL in the *.desktop file has a trailing slash, the browser opens with a trailing slash. It doesn't have a trailing slash, the browser opens without a trailing slash. Does this bug still happen for anyone using version 3.6 or newer?
Closing this bug report as no further information has been provided. Please feel free to reopen this bug report if you can provide the information that was asked for in a previous comment. Thanks!