Electron-cash: Browser bitcoincash: links do not work on macOS

[imaginaryusername]

When clicking on bitcoincash:xxxx links in browsers, if EC is not running, it opens EC and fills in the send tab. However, if EC is already running, it does nothing.

[cculianu]

Well, I'm trying this on macOS first. It appears that PyQt completely doesn't pass along the "QFileOpenEvent" to the Qt application on PyQt.

This is a bug in PyQt. If I create a C++ program and replace "Electron-Cash" with it, it receives the event.

But in the Python app -- no event is received.

I suspect it has to do with package freezing or something about how macos gets built.

Likely Electrum is hit by this too.

On Linux I believe a different mechanism is used, as is on Windows.

Have to investigate each platform separately to fix this. Not pretty ... :/

[cculianu]

I created an issue with the Electrum devs since there are more of them and perhaps their insights/discussion would be helpful.

https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/4796

[cculianu]

This is now fixed for windows & linux with the latest commit. Still an issue on Mac that needs fixing in pyinstaller (not pyqt as I initially thought).

I'm working on a pyinstaller patch. If I figure it out I can submit the patch to the pyinstaller devs.

[cculianu]

I submitted a patch to fix this to the pyinstaller project. PR is here:

https://github.com/pyinstaller/pyinstaller/pull/3832

[cculianu]

Update: This works now on Windows & Linux with git latest. For macOS, my pyinstaller patch needs to be accepted then it will work once we build & release with the new pyinstaller sometime in the future.

[cculianu]

This is fixed on macOS release. The pyinstaller guys are slow in merging PRs. So I went ahead and built Electron Cash for macOS using my fork that handles URLs properly.

Closing as it's fixed in 3.3.2 release (to be out shortly).