Bug#258564: nautilus: Nautilus' file type handling is very broken

[Kevin Brown]

J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 10, 2004 at 03:51:16 -0700, Kevin Brown wrote:
> > But nautilus doesn't seem to make use of any of that.  If you examine the
> > properties of a .pdf file from within nautilus, it says that the type is
> > "Unknown type" and the MIME type is "application/octet-stream".
> 
> What MIME type is indicated in the output of "gnomevfs-info" on your PDFs?
> 
> If it's "application/octet-stream" as well,

It was.

> please try 
> 	apt-get install --reinstall shared-mime-info
> and re-test. Does this make the problem go away?

Yes, indeed that did the trick.  Many thanks!

> > Nautilus 2.6.3-2 worked, but downgrading back to that version doesn't
> > actually solve this problem, so the actual breakage is somewhere else.
> 
> Nautilus, like most GNOME applications that deal with MIME information,
> primarily relies on the GNOME-VFS framework, which gets its data from
> shared-mime-info.

Makes sense.  It didn't occur to me to attempt a reinstall of that
package, since it wasn't upgraded during the last dist-upgrade (during
which many packages, including nautilus, were upgraded).  The current
version of shared-mime-info has been around since May 8, and the
dist-upgrade I did prior to the one that broke nautilus was done well
after May 8 (in fact, it was done after June 17, which is when nautilus
2.6.3-2 came out).

In short, the installation of something only a few days old broke
shared-mime-info, I guess.  I'm not sure how to go about figuring out
what did that, since I don't have a list of packages that were upgraded.

It's not nautilus itself or nautilus-data, at least, that caused this.

I guess the interesting question is where this bug belongs now.


-- 
Kevin Brown					      kevin@sysexperts.com