Bug#1115704: gnome-session-common: doesn't prefer Papers/Showtime if Evince/Totem aren't installed

[Martin-Éric Racine]

pe 19.9.2025 klo 13.28 Simon McVittie (smcv at debian.org) kirjoitti:
>
> On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 at 13:00:23 +0300, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> >pe 19.9.2025 klo 12.55 Simon McVittie (smcv at debian.org) kirjoitti:
> >> The gnome-session-common in experimental already prefers Papers, but I
> >> don't think we're ready to release that to unstable yet.
>
> The reason I say this is because of the upstream code in gnome-session
> (which is entangled with components like gnome-shell and gdm), rather
> than because of the MIME apps list. It would be fine to prefer Papers
> with higher priority than Evince in unstable.

Seeing the commit you just made, I better understand how it's prioritized.

> In stable, I think it would be more appropriate (certainly more
> conservative) to prefer Evince as higher priority than Papers, while
> still preferring Papers as higher priority than any other random app
> that happens to be able to open PDFs, such as GIMP.

Agreed. A trixie-update upload would be welcome.

> The problem is that Evince, Papers and GIMP all declare that they are
> valid PDF handlers, and in the absence of any information about which
> one to prefer, the desktop environment infrastructure will chose one
> essentially at random. I suspect it might be as simple as GIMP coming
> before Papers in alphabetical order, or perhaps gimp.desktop before
> org.gnome.Papers.desktop.

Oh... Yes, that's probably what causes it.

> Ideally there would be a way for GIMP to say "yes technically I can open
> PDFs, but it's never appropriate for this to be the default", so that
> random other PDF readers like xpdf would always "win" vs. GIMP; but there
> is currently no such mechanism in the freedesktop.org specifications
> (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/219,
> https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-specs/-/issues/43) and until such
> a mechanism exists, it is not possible for GIMP to declare that it
> supports PDFs without it sometimes becoming the default.

Noted.

Thanks for this super quick fix for unstable.

Martin-Éric