Feature: No calls to any external applications=full offline mode

[lanmarc77]

I have a few .zim that seem to contain content that lets kiwix open a browser. Mainly audio files that are in the zim as part of the page but were not downloaded.

My requests asks to add e.g. a setup option to disable all calls to external applications (xdg-open, kde-open...). The application should also not open any connections to internet addresses on it's own. This might result in pages not displayed correctly but thats the compromise then.

Workaround for now: For Linux a shared library that intercepts execve can be used to disable calls to xdg-open or kde-open.

[kelson42]

What is the precise version of Kiwix for which you report this issue? What let you think that an external HTTP call is made?

[lanmarc77]

I am using 2.3.1 and now realize this is pretty old. The Arch package is already flagged as out of date.
After reading through the changelogs it seems with version 2.4.0 there is a notice: "Block any resource required within a ZIM page". Might be that this option does block execve calls?

I have not yet noticed that kiwix-desktop is opening own network requests. I just wanted to add this to the option I could imagine as being called full offline mode.
And there might be even more programmatic options beside execve and network requests that I am not aware of to break out of offline mode. These should also be disabled then (if they exist).

[lanmarc77]

After opening an issue with Arch it seems there is a version conflict that blocks new versions within Arch:
Hi! The reason this package isn't updated is due to dependency version conflicts with kiwix-tools. The latest version of kiwix-desktop (2.4) requires libkiwix 14, but the latest version of kiwix-tools requires libkiwix 13. I keep both packages on a version that builds against the same libkiwix version (12).

Are you able to fix this?