Bug#681687: missing mime entry

[Russ Allbery]

Steve Langasek <vorlon at debian.org> writes:

>  - It's not clear what the transitional behavior should be when a package
>    includes both a .desktop file and a usr/lib/mime/packages file.  There's
>    no reliable way to associate the contents of the two files, so this
>    probably ends up with duplicated entries in /etc/mailcap, possibly with
>    small variations; just from a quick look on my system, I find that the
>    libreoffice .desktop and mime files use quite different program
>    invocations.  This is of course exactly why we want to not maintain
>    duplicate information in multiple files, but we should have a clear idea
>    about which we expect to take precedence, and make sure this is
>    implemented, so that users don't wind up with buggy behavior on their
>    systems due to random ordering.  If this update-mime change is accepted
>    for wheezy, the transition will most definitely be ongoing at release
>    time, so we really ought to get this right.

I think the mime/packages file should obviously take precedence for
programs using mailcap, since that's the target of the automated
conversion.  You always want the manually-maintained file to override the
results of any automated conversion, since that way you can work around
any bugs in the conversion (or missing features, like priority) by
providing a manually-maintained file.

> Broadly speaking, I think the correct long-term solution is to first add
> support to update-mime for reading both .desktop files and mime files,
> and then to update policy to tell maintainers to use .desktop files
> instead of mime files.  And I think it's better for Debian if we can get
> the first part done prior to the wheezy release.  But I would like the
> release team to make their own determination of whether the patch that's
> currently up for consideration is of sufficient quality, and
> sufficiently safe, to be granted a freeze exception.

This sounds right to me as well.  I think we should ensure the most
critical media types are working in both systems for the wheezy release
and then aim at removing the requirement to support update-mime for all
packages providing .desktop files for wheezy+1.

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