[h-e-w] .mailcap on Windows / launching file attachments with "meadow" or "start" or "cygstart" etc.

[John Owens]

Using GNU Emacs 21.3.50.1 (i386-mingw-nt5.1.2600) of
2005-01-30

I run the "Wanderlust" mailer under emacs on both
WinXP and OS X. In that mailer I would like to launch
file attachments in mail messages (so that when I
receive a PDF I can launch Acrobat to view it).

Wanderlust uses the MIME library called "SEMI", which
has a method to "mime-preview-play-current-entity".
This looks in .mailcap to find out how to play 
the entity in question.

Now, on OS X, this all works fine. My mailcap has
entries that look like the following:

image/*: /sw/bin/launch -w %s

which uses the nice "launch" utility that simply
launches the associated application with the file. All
good. This works fine under CVS.

I have never got this to work under emacs on Windows.
I was using the 21.3 release for a while, recently
updated to the CVS build from 30 January (above), and
have tried a number of .mailcap entries to make this
work. Among them are "cygstart" (from cygwin), the
builtin "start", and "fiber" (from meadow) that are
all supposed to launch helper apps given a file name.
When I call mime-preview-play-current-entity, emacs
records two messages:

Wrote c:/temp/EMI2060j4R/indep_study_proposal.doc
External method is starting...

and then nothing happens. No helper app launches.
However, if I call, say,

weetabix 1% fiber -s
c:/temp/EMI2060j4R/indep_study_proposal.doc

from the command line, everything works as I would
expect.

If I try to quit emacs, I get a message like the
following:

Proc                                                   Status   Buffer      
Command
----                                                   ------   ------      ---
----
fiber -s "c:/temp/EMI2060j4R/indep_study_proposal.doc"
run     *MIME-echo* 
C:/Program Files/emacs/bin/cmdproxy.exe -cf fiber -
s "c:/temp/EMI2060j4R/indep_study_proposal.doc"

I first thought this was a problem with my launcher,
but now I'm leaning more toward emacs being the
problem since I've tried a couple of launchers now.
And since it works perfectly on OS X emacs, I don't
think the fundamental approach is flawed.

Might I request some help in debugging this, or if
others have .mailcap approaches that work fine, I'll
happily hear those too?

JDO




                
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