Bug#647272: mailcap deprecated?

[Michael Leuchtenburg]

On 2011-11-16 13:18, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> First of all, please use a mail client that honors Reply-To
> correctly.

Which would currently have this bug in there twice, oddly enough. I
intentionally used reply-all since I had previously been requested to
do that when discussing bugs.

> Le mercredi 16 novembre 2011 à 13:12 -0500, Michael Leuchtenburg a 
> écrit :
>> On 2011-11-16 12:36, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> Yes this is what I meant. It could be used as a fallback, but using
> it by default if no DE is detected is absolutely brain-dead.

You said it was a bug to "rely on mailcap as a fallback". Did you drop
a word?

/etc/mailcap has been a primary way to resolve MIME for a loooong time
now. Using it is now brain-dead? This is what I was asking - when did
it become Debian's policy not to support mailcap? Or is this just a
single-app initiative?

>> 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.
> 
> That would be gvfs-open in gvfs-bin. Unlike run-mailcap or
> whatever crap, it will correctly handle defaults depending on the
> current DE.

So what you're saying is, if Gnome isn't running, it should use a
Gnome tool to open things? xdg-open uses gvfs-open if Gnome is running
and does not use it if Gnome isn't running, presumably under the
reasonable assumption that non-Gnome users are not using Gnome for a
reason. I don't have gvfs-open installed and I would rather keep my
system as Gnome-free as possible. Less random background crap for me,
thanks.

Cheers,
Michael