Fixing the mime horror ini Debian

[Per Olofsson]

Hi,

2012-07-13 11:13, Norbert Preining skrev:
> Hi everyone,
>
> can we somehome make $subject a target for the*next*  release?
> It is ridiculous that it is in fact completely arbitrary what
> program is used to open files. Currently in my gnome-shell
> pdfs are opened with a file-manager, as well as .txt files, as
> well as anything.
>
> That is when using xdg-open or gnome-open of gvfs-open.
> When I try see, in contrast the funny okular from KDE
> is started, together with these very useful services of KDE.
>
> So maybe someone can explain what are the problems, that these
> things are simply not fixd. Cannot be so complicated, right?
>

I think the most viable solution would be to:

1. Rewrite xdg-utils so that it is robust and always works. Instead of 
relying on desktop environments, it should do the needed work by itself. 
Currently it's something of a hack, especially when running in "generic" 
mode. It should probably be written in another language than shell (e.g. 
Perl, Python, C). A nicer user interface for the command line wouldn't 
hurt either.

2. Make all other packages either use xdg-utils or follow the 
freedesktop.org MIME specs.

I'm not planning on doing it myself though.

-- 
Pelle