Bug#277181: no associaton for ms word .doc files

[Loïc Minier]

Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> - Mon, Oct 18, 2004:

> On a fresh sarge install, clicking on a .doc file in MS Word format
> yeilds a message that there is no app associated with that extension
> and offers to let me add one.

 There's a triple problem concerning MS Word file handling right now:
 - the official MIME type for MS Word is application/msword, and for
   Excel files, application/vns.ms-excel, but some documents are sent as
   application/vns.ms-word or even application/msexcel.  Freedesktop is
   supposed to bring a package called shared-mime-info which holds a
   bunch of standard MIME types and globbing patterns, but the current
   shared-mime-info uses "application/vns.ms-word" as the main MIME type
   for *.doc files, and defines an aliases "application/msword" for this
   MIME type
 - gnomevfs only provides a single MIME type when you ask it for the
   MIME type of the file, and its application/vnd.ms-word.  If you want
   to open a file based on such gnomevfs information, you're on the
   wrong way (because you're using an alias MIME type in a place where
   you should not), and this is likely why on my system:
   bee% gnomevfs-ls | grep log-server.doc
   log-server.doc          (Regular, application/vnd.ms-word)      size
   1001984   mode 0600
   bee% gnome-open file:///home/lool/log-server.doc
   Error showing url: There is no default action associated with this
   location.
 - even if the above mentionned type isn't the main type, you should be
   able to open a file with type a or type b if (some application can open
   type a or some application can open type b) and type a and b are
   aliases

 There's actually another problem, but certainly close to gnomevfs
 returning the wrong mime type:
 - gnome-libs-data provides a mean of recognizing a MIME type based on
   file content, but returns text/vnd.ms-word as a MIME type, which is
   the worst I've seen.

 Most of the above is already reported on Debian, and I can't categorize
 your problem in one of the above slots only.  BTW, most of these is
 also reported upstream, sadly no-one seems to deal with freedesktop.org
 bugs, and implementing aliases in MIME types handling is certainly
 non-trivial.

 I hope I made a good summary of the problems we have, perhaps some
 other reader might want to reassign joeyh's bug somewhere appropriate,
 'cause I'm tired right now.

   'night,

-- 
Loïc Minier <lool@dooz.org>