Bug#647272: mailcap deprecated?

[Josselin Mouette]

Le mercredi 16 novembre 2011 à 14:00 -0500, Michael Leuchtenburg a
écrit : 
> You said it was a bug to "rely on mailcap as a fallback". Did you drop
> a word?

Yes.

> /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?

Mailcap is a unmaintainable, legacy junk. The only way for it to survive
would be if someone wrote a tool to generate the mailcap file based on
the available desktop files. So far, people have been more keen on
whining than on writing a simple script.

> 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.

gvfs-open is not a GNOME-only tool. The only library it uses is GIO, and
as I said, it will use the appropriate defaults based on the environment
- mailcap will not.

-- 
 .''`.      Josselin Mouette
: :' :
`. `'
  `-
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