Bug#647272: mailcap deprecated?

[Michael Leuchtenburg]

On 2011-11-16 12:36, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> Le mercredi 16 novembre 2011 à 02:04 -0500, Michael Leuchtenburg a 
> écrit :
>> Is it now Debian's policy to not support mailcap as a mechanism
>> for resolving MIME references? I can find no reference to this
>> anywhere, so I am puzzled by this regression. It caused Chrome to
>> fail to open PDFs as it uses xdg-open. This was very
>> time-consuming to track down.
> 
> I’d say it is a bug in xdg-open to rely on mailcap as a fallback.
> It should use the mechanisms in gio as soon as they are available.

xdg-open uses mailcap as a first choice, not a fallback, if there is
no DE detected.

Note that xdg-open is a shell script - it just detects the DE and
calls the appropriate thing. With no DE, it first tries run-mailcap
and then mimeopen. There doesn't appear to exist a "gio-open" or
similar so it couldn't easily use gio. Also, I don't seem to have
anything that appears to allow opening files using a MIME database in
/usr/lib/gio/modules, so that would clearly not work here. I'm not
sure in what environment it *would* work; maybe yours?

Cheers,
Michael