I have configured a handler for the tel: URI prefix and confirmed the
settings are present in gconf:

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/command
/usr/bin/sipdialer %s

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/needs_terminal
false

$ gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/tel/enabled
true



I create a test.html containing:

<a href="tel:+442071234567">dial it</a>

Clicking the link in Epiphany gives this error (I'm not sure if it is
just for "tel" or all manually configured prefixes):

Oops! It was not possible to show this website

The website at tel:+442071234567 seems to be unavailable. The precise
error was:

URL cannot be shown

It could be temporarily switched off or moved to a new address. Don't
forget to check that your internet connection is working correctly.



Expected action: Epiphany should give the URI to the handler configured
in the desktop.

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 19:59 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :

GConf is no longer where such settings are stored.
You need to set a x-scheme-handler/tel MIME association.

There is a lot of documentation about the gconf approach (including in
my own sipdialer package README) - is there any way to help people avoid
getting stuck on issues like this?

Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?

There is a lot of documentation about the gconf approach (including in
my own sipdialer package README) - is there any way to help people avoid
getting stuck on issues like this?

Did this change with wheezy or with squeeze?

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 20:33 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :

This changed between squeeze and wheezy.

Cheers,

Still doesn't work for iceweasel or icedove though

I created a desktop entry sipdialer.desktop and I edited
.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list adding:

[Added Associations]
...
...
x-scheme-handler/tel=sipdialer.desktop;



Now, if I click the tel: URI in a web page or in the icedove address
book (using xul-ext-tbdialout) the "Launch Application" popup appears -
and there is no default option for me to choose.  I would expect to see
the "sipdialer" option in the popup.  Instead, it just has a "Choose"
button that opens a filesystem browser.

I can successfully launch the URI from the command line using commands
like these:

 gvfs-open tel:+442071234567

 xdg-open tel:+442071234567

and it also works from Chromium now.  Just not from iceweasel or icedove.

The final comments in this issue also appear very similar:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=748643

Another user having the same problem, only with Mozilla apps, with
x-scheme-handler:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=174245

This seems OK from Epiphany now but I'm not sure if the remaining issues
are just Mozilla bugs or some deeper problem with this whole change to
.desktop files.  Can you suggest where I should follow up on this and/or
reassign this bug?

Le vendredi 02 mai 2014 à 23:26 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :

MIME handling in Firefox is absolutely awful, so unfortunately I’m not
surprised by your findings. I think it’s safe to assume the problem is
limited to Mozilla products.

Thanks for the feedback - I've now reassigned the bug to iceweasel

I still think it is crazy that the gconftool-2 utility is still present
and still appears to work when invoked by the user.  This is a waste of
time for people.  If it is no longer relevant, it should have been
removed or it should display an error when people try to use it to
configure these handlers.

Le samedi 03 mai 2014 à 08:03 +0200, Daniel Pocock a écrit :

The GNOME team is an advocate of aggressively removing obsolete
packages, but in this case, there are still 151 packages using GConf in
unstable. Just because GNOME has migrated away from it doesn’t mean it
isn’t still widely used. It is even used as a GSettings backend by some
people who don’t like the faster binary format dconf uses.

I've tested on stretch with
Firefox 52.2.0esr-1~deb9u1
Epiphany 3.22.7-1
Thunderbird 1:45.8.0-3
 (using xul-ext-tbdialout 1.7.2-1)

and I'm pleased to see it working, except for one unrelated tbdialout bug.

To test, I created /home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test:

#!/bin/bash

echo $1 >> /tmp/sipdialer.log




and ~/.local/share/applications/sipdialer.desktop

[Desktop Entry]
Name=sipdialer
GenericName=Click to dial
Comment=Click to dial
Type=Application
NoDisplay=true
TryExec=/home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test
Exec=/home/daniel/bin/sipdialer-test %u
Terminal=false
Categories=System
Icon=/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/vlc.png
MimeType=x-scheme-handler/tel;



and also edited .local/share/applications/mimeapps.list

[Added Associations]
...
x-scheme-handler/tel=sipdialer.desktop
...




Then I ran "update-menus" and I was able to click a "tel" link in
Firefox and it launched ~/bin/sipdialer-test with the phone number as an
argument.

GNOME Evolution in stretch also supports the same handler now[1] and I
tested that too and it passes a similar URL to the handler.  That means
the same handler script (maybe sipdialer from reSIProcate or something
else) can handle the "tel:" URI (click-to-dial) from Firefox,
Thunderbird and Evolution.

One problem I noticed with tbdialout: it strips the leading "+" from the
phone number.  It is necessary to add it back in the plugin preferences,
under "Replace leading + with:", maybe it should be there by default as
it is non-intuitive what will happen when that field is blank.

Regards,

Daniel


1. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729084

src:iceweasel has been superseded by src:firefox-esr in version
45.0esr-1 in March 2016. Transitional packages to ease upgrades were
provided in the wheezy, jessie, stretch and buster releases. The
transitional packages have been removed finally before the bullseye
release in August 2021.
After regular security support for buster ended in August 2022 and LTS
support ended in June 2024, I'm closing the remaining bug reports now.

Andreas