Bug#1115704: papers: fails to register itself as the default app for PDF files

[Simon McVittie]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 at 10:40:19 +0300, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
>Since migrating from Evince to Papers, I keep on having to manually
>select which app I want to open PDF files, otherwise, they open in
>Gimp. I never had that problem with Evince.

In what desktop environment?

Apps cannot register themselves as "the default app" for a MIME type 
(intentionally not a thing they can do, to avoid app authors fighting 
over the default), they can only register themselves as *an* app that 
can open a MIME type. It's up to desktop environments to set a 
preferred app or apps (in GNOME this is done in 
/usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list, part of 
gnome-session-common).

I see that the /usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list in 
gnome-session-common only lists Evince and not Papers, so there's 
certainly a change to be made there.

     smcv