bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[N. Jackson]

In the Gnus (v5.13) Article buffer, clicking or RET on an attachment has
different behaviour depending upon the type of document:

- Microsoft Office files with .doc, .xls etc. extensions get opened (in
LibreOffice on my system) which is the desired behaviour.

- But for LibreOffice files with .odt, .ods etc. extensions, Gnus just
offers to save the file.

Other actions on the attachments can be accessed by right clicking on
them (and probably in other ways), but for the LibreOffice files, there
does not seem to be an option for opening them.

Support for LibreOffice files probably ought to be at least as good as
the support for Microsoft Office files.

(Note: Newer-format Microsoft Office files (with .docx, .xlsx
etc. extensions) seem to have the same lack of support for opening as the
LibreOffice files, and it would be nice if these too could be opened.)

For a concrete example, with the following email from myself in the
Article buffer

    From: nljlistbox2@gmail.com (N. Jackson)
    Subject: Test of office suite files
    To: nljlistbox2@gmail.com
    Date: Sun, 23 Aug 2015 12:34:53 -0300 (1 hour, 20 minutes, 58 seconds ago)

    [1. An .odt format file --- application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text; mydocument.odt]...

    [2. An .doc format file --- application/msword; mydocument.doc]...

    [3. An .docx format file --- application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; mydocument.docx]...

If I hit RET on the second attachment (the old-format Word file) it is
opened in LibreOffice, but RET on the other two attachments just results
in a prompt to save them.

[To provide a more complete bug report (and with the thought of maybe
attempting a patch) I tried to track this functionality down, but
unfortunately its implementation is a little beyond my current level of
understanding. C-h k RET here reports

    RET runs the command gnus-article-press-button, which is an
    interactive compiled Lisp function in `gnus-art.el'.

    It is bound to RET, <menu-bar> <MIME Part> <Toggle Display>.

    (gnus-article-press-button)

    Check text at point for a callback function.
    If the text at point has a `gnus-callback' property,
    call it with the value of the `gnus-data' text property.

and I don't know (yet) how to extract text property information.]


In GNU Emacs 24.5.1 (x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.14.15)
 of 2015-08-18 on moondust
Windowing system distributor `Fedora Project', version 11.0.11603000
System Description:	Fedora release 21 (Twenty One)

Configured using:
 `configure --prefix=/home/nlj/local/ --enable-checking=yes,glyphs
 'CFLAGS=-O0 -g3 -ggdb''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_MONETARY: en_DK.utf8
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: en_DK.utf8
  value of $LC_TIME: en_DK.utf8
  value of $LANG: en_CA.utf8
  value of $XMODIFIERS: @im=ibus
  locale-coding-system: utf-8-unix

Major mode: Group

Minor modes in effect:
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  delete-selection-mode: t
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Recent messages:
Quit [4 times]
Beginning of buffer [2 times]
Updating buffer list...done
Commands: m, u, t, RET, g, k, S, D, Q; q to quit; h for help
Mark set
Mark saved where search started [2 times]
Mark set
Mark saved where search started
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call-interactively: End of buffer [4 times]

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bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > - Microsoft Office files with .doc, .xls etc. extensions get opened (in
  > LibreOffice on my system) which is the desired behaviour.

  > - But for LibreOffice files with .odt, .ods etc. extensions, Gnus just
  > offers to save the file.

We should certainly offer no less support to LibreOffice and its
formats than to any Microsoft formats.

Can someone fix this?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Glenn Morris]

I guess this is related to mailcap.
Examine your /etc/mailcap file and the value of Emacs's mailcap-mime-data.

If wildcards are involved, see
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnus-english/2012-01/msg00027.html

(which crosses months so is easier to read on
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gnu.emacs.gnus/T-0xfP3fxjY  )

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[N. Jackson]

tags 21331 notabug
stop

At 14:26 -0300 on Monday 2015-08-24, Glenn Morris wrote:

> I guess this is related to mailcap. Examine your /etc/mailcap file and
> the value of Emacs's mailcap-mime-data.

Thanks Glenn, you are quite right.

And it's right there in the manual at (info "(gnus) Using MIME"):

       The following commands are available when you have placed point over
    a MIME button:

    ‘RET (Article)’
    ‘BUTTON-2 (Article)’
         Toggle displaying of the MIME object (‘gnus-article-press-button’).
         If built-in viewers can not display the object, Gnus resorts to
         external viewers in the ‘mailcap’ files.

    ...

I had searched the manual for "attachment" instead of for "MIME" which
was why I missed it.

It turns out that I had the line

    application/msword; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

in my mailcap file and that was causing the behaviour I observed. I
guess I mis-remembered that other Microsoft Office documents were opened
correctly from Gnus (or perhaps that was on another system).

For completeness, I can report that with the following lines in my
/etc/mailcap

    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.database; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    application/msword; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-excel; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-powerpoint; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.ms-access; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

all of .odt, .ods, .odp, .odb, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .docx, .xlsx, .pptx
files now open as desired in LibreOffice. (I was unable to test with
.mdb files as I don't have a program on my system that will open them.)

So not a bug.

Sorry for the noise.

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I guess this is related to mailcap.
  > Examine your /etc/mailcap file and the value of Emacs's mailcap-mime-data.

How can we get this fixed in everyone's mailcap file?
Where does mailcap come from?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[N. Jackson]

At 19:13 -0300 on Tuesday 2015-08-25, Richard Stallman wrote:

> Where does mailcap come from?

Mailcap is Network Working Group RFC 1524 [1]. "A mailcap file can be
used to find the correct program to open a file with, based on MIME
information. While the name is "mailcap" and is related to MIME (mail
filetypes) it actually has use outside the domain of electronic mail"
[2].

My mailcap file came with my OS distribution (Fedora 21 GNU/Linux) and I
would guess their distribution is where most users' mailcap files come
from.

I suspect (but am not certain), that I, rather than Red Hat, am guilty
of adding the line to it that allowed Gnus to open Microsoft Word file
attachments, inadvertently kicking off this bug report. Otherwise Gnus
would have failed to open all office suite file attachments equally.

> How can we get this fixed in everyone's mailcap file?

I don't see how that could be possible for Emacs. Presumably each user
must edit their own mailcap files to add support for the MIME types they
choose. The only support that Emacs could provide for this IIUC would be
to provide more explicit and more easily-found documentation.

An alternative solution, at least for users using desktop environments
such as Gnome, KDE, and Xfce, would be for Emacs to make use of
freedesktop.org facilities such as xdg-utils. I envisage users being
able to launch from within Emacs (from dired, say), not only LibreOffice
to open it's associated files, but to launch the correct program to open
any file on their system (provided their desktop environment knows how
to open the file) -- when Emacs is unable to open it internally. [But
perhaps this functionality already exists and I just haven't discovered
it yet?]


[1] Network Working Group, RFC 1524: A User Agent Configuration
Mechanism For Multimedia Mail Format Information.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1524

[2] Wikipedia, Mailcap. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailcap

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > How can we get this fixed in everyone's mailcap file?

  > I don't see how that could be possible for Emacs. Presumably each user
  > must edit their own mailcap files to add support for the MIME types they
  > choose. The only support that Emacs could provide for this IIUC would be
  > to provide more explicit and more easily-found documentation.

In my machine, running Trisquel, mailcap includes items that point at
emacs.  Not the Emacs I use, which is built from master, but an
installed Emacs 24.  I did not add those entries myself.

Can anyone find out where they come from?
Does installing the Emacs package add them?

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Michael Welsh Duggan]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>   > I guess this is related to mailcap.
>   > Examine your /etc/mailcap file and the value of Emacs's mailcap-mime-data.
>
> How can we get this fixed in everyone's mailcap file?

You can't (easily).  The system mailcap file is generally handled by the
GNU/Linux distribution.  You could automatically muck up a user's
~/.mailcap file, but that is not very friendly.  This should probably be
fixed by updating the mailcap-mime-data var mentioned by Glenn in
lisp/gnus/mailcap.el.  The entries in this variable are used if there is
no existing entry in a user's or the system's mailcap.  As this appears
to be the case in the original bug report, that would likely fix this
problem.

-- 
Michael Welsh Duggan
(md5i@md5i.com)

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Glenn Morris]

I really doubt any GNU/Linux distribution has better support for MS
Office in this area (a program they cannot ship or even install,
ignoring Wine) then LibreOffice (which they do ship). /etc/mailcap on
Debian seems to have the relevant soffice entries. /etc/mailcap on Red
Hat seems to be largely empty, basically punting everything to xdg-open,
which works fine for me on LibreOffice docs even in RHEL7, so I'm sure
it does on Fedora.

So on modern systems probably Emacs should give up and just call
xdg-open. (Though I seem to recall it's a pain because it forks and
seems to exit.)

But yes, some fallback mailcap entries would paper things over.

bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support than Microsoft Office docs (in Gnus?)

[Rasmus]

Glenn Morris <rgm@gnu.org> writes:

> So on modern systems probably Emacs should give up and just call
> xdg-open. (Though I seem to recall it's a pain because it forks and
> seems to exit.)

I agree.  Mailcap is a lot of work and should probably be an opt-in over
xdg-open.  AFAICT my distro ("Archlinux") does not even seem to provide a
mailcap file in the official repos.

I think there's some problem with gvfs-open, though,

       https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=652262

Rasmus

-- 
Spil noget med Slayer!

bug#21331: mailcap (was Re: bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support...)

[N. Jackson]

I apologise profusely for causing this disturbance with a bug title that
turns out to have been a result of user misunderstanding.

As pointed out when I closed the bug, this is not an Emacs bug. Through
a mechanism of which I do not know the details, Gnus can open mail
attachments in an external program if there is an entry for the MIME
type of the attachment in the system (or user's?) mailcap file.

I happened to have an entry for the MIME type "application/msword" in my
mailcap file and no entries for LibreOffice files, causing the behaviour
I observed and misinterpreted as being "caused" by Emacs.

At 13:19 -0300 on Wednesday 2015-08-26, Glenn Morris wrote:

> I really doubt any GNU/Linux distribution has better support for MS
> Office in this area (a program they cannot ship or even install,
> ignoring Wine) then LibreOffice (which they do ship).

Checking this today, I deleted my mailcap file and reinstalled the
mailcap package from the Fedora 21 repository. The newly installed file
is:

    ### 
    ### Begin Red Hat Mailcap
    ###

    audio/*; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    image/*; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    application/msword; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/pdf; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s
    application/postscript ; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s

    text/html; /usr/bin/xdg-open %s ; copiousoutput

I'm guessing that the entry for msword has been added automatically
based on some configuration I've inadvertently made somewhere else
(probably as a desperate measure when I first switched permanently away
from Windows and needed to view a file from work).

But the possibility exists that this entry came from the distribution.
That would mean that for programs that use mailcap rather than desktop
facilities (xdg-utils or whatever), there is better support on Fedora
for Microsoft Word files (which will open in LibreOffice) than for
LibreOffice documents. But I too really doubt that. It worries me
though, so I will probably go on investigating until I find the truth of
the matter.

But not an Emacs problem.

> So on modern systems probably Emacs should give up and just call
> xdg-open.

That would be nice.

> (Though I seem to recall it's a pain because it forks and seems to
> exit.)

Presumably Gnus successfully uses xdg-open after it finds the xdg-open
entries in my mailcap file, so this problem can't be insurmountable, it
seems.

bug#21331: mailcap (was Re: bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support...)

[N. Jackson]

At 14:34 -0300 on Wednesday 2015-08-26, N. Jackson wrote:

> At 13:19 -0300 on Wednesday 2015-08-26, Glenn Morris wrote:
>
>> I really doubt any GNU/Linux distribution has better support for MS
>> Office in this area (a program they cannot ship or even install,
>> ignoring Wine) then LibreOffice (which they do ship).
>
> I too really doubt that.

Well it turns out we are both mistaken... 

> It worries me though, so I will probably go on investigating until I
> find the truth of the matter.

Surprisingly the preferential support for Microsoft Word files over
LibreOffice Writer files that I observed _is_ coming from the Fedora
distribution and has nothing to do with my own configuration; the
mailcap file on my system after reinstalling the mailcap package --
which has the msword MIME type support -- is identical to the one in the
distribution sources [1].

I have opened a bug report [2] against Fedora mailcap requesting that
they rectify this. 

[1] http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/mailcap.git

[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1257331

bug#21331: mailcap (was Re: bug#21331: 24.5; LibreOffice documents have less support...)

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > I have opened a bug report [2] against Fedora mailcap requesting that
  > they rectify this. 

Thanks.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.