Bug#658139: Bug#681687: Bug#658139: missing mime entry

[Russ Allbery]

Michael Biebl <biebl at debian.org> writes:
> On 18.07.2012 11:14, Neil McGovern wrote:

>> For info, I do not consider all packages missing a mime file to be RC
>> buggy. I consider #658139 RC.

> And what is the reason that makes evince special and distinguishes it
> from other packages which never shipped a mime file or no longer do?

It leads to PDF files being opened in Gimp, which you must agree is very
surprising behavior.

The MIME type entry for PDF files is not just any MIME entry.  I suspect
it is used an order of magnitude more often than any other MIME entry on
the system, if not more.  Speaking just for myself, it would be much
appreciated if you could re-add the update-mime MIME entry just for the
PDF viewer for the wheezy release while we work out a better long-term
solution for how to handle non-FDO-aware applications that need MIME
handling.

To be clear, I completely agree with your long-term direction here and
don't consider maintaining Debian's custom MIME system independent of the
FDO files, or asking GNOME maintainers to maintain separate configuration
files in addition to the standard FDO files, to be viable long-term
approaches.  But I'd like to see this transition be at least somewhat
smooth for our users, not horribly surprising (which is what it seems to
be for non-FDO-aware applications processing PDF files at the moment).  I
wouldn't ask you to re-add all of the hundred-odd files you removed, but
this one in particular is much more user-visible than most.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>