Bug#888652: baobab: Baobab opens the wrong handler for inode/directory MIME type

[Simon McVittie]

On Mon, 29 Jan 2018 at 10:29:40 +0100, Rafael Varela Pet wrote:
> 2018-01-28 14:17 GMT+01:00 Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org>:
> > On Sun, 28 Jan 2018 at 13:29:32 +0100, Rafael Varela Pet wrote:
> > > [baobab] seems to ignore the default setting under Xfce4
...
> > What is in ~/.config/mimeapps.list, if that file exists?
> 
> You can find attached a copy of it. For the inode/* MIME type it only
> has a reference to Thunar:
> 
> $ grep -i inode ~/.config/mimeapps.list
> inode/symlink=Thunar-folder-handler.desktop

If you have explicitly configured Thunar to be the default in XFCE,
I would have expected that it would have another entry

    inode/directory=Thunar-folder-handler.desktop

I wonder what XFCE does when you change that default setting, if not
writing to ~/.config/mimeapps.list? Perhaps changing the preferred
handler to something else and back to Thunar would work around this?

>From the configuration that you sent, it seems as though all the possible
inode/directory handlers (even Kaffeine) might have an equal claim to be
the "best" handler, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's non-deterministic
which one is chosen. I'm surprised that gio(1) and baobab consistently
make different choices, though - I would have expected that they're
using the same code to do it...

Perhaps XFCE should install an xfce-mimeapps.list similar to GNOME's
gnome-mimeapps.list (but with different choices), to arrange for XFCE
apps to be preferred when running XFCE if all other factors are equal
and there is no relevant personal configuration.

    smcv