Fixing the mime horror ini Debian

[Brian White]

That seems a reasonable plan to me.  I've orphaned the mime-support
package, however, because I have no time to work on it right now and do not
expect to have any for the foreseeable future.

-- Brian

On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 8:26 PM, Vincent Bernat <bernat at debian.org> wrote:

>  ❦ 13 juillet 2012 12:18 CEST, Per Olofsson <pelle at dsv.su.se> :
>
> > 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.
>
> Yes, I also think this is a good plan.
>
> Relying on existing desktop tools is too difficult. They get deprecated
> (for example, gnome-open has been replaced by gvfs-open) or they cannot
> be adapted easily because maintainers usually don't care about those
> corner use cases. For example, gvfs-open does not wait for the viewer to
> terminate, this makes difficult for mailers to pass a temporary
> file. See:
>  - http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=677430
>  - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652262
>  - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678504
>
> Once you get a working xdg-open, you can get a compatibility layer for
> the mailcap stuff:
>   */*; xdg-open '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"
>
> Or something more sensible like:
>   image/gif; xdg-open -t image/gif '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"
>   image/png; xdg-open -t image/png '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"
>   [...]
>
> The remaining problem is defining the priority of such entries compared
> to entries inserted by packages still supporting mailcap.
> --
> #if 0
>         2.2.16 /usr/src/linux/fs/buffer.c
>
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