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From: Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>
To: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: RFC: Make ~/.mailcap override other settings
Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2018 23:22:24 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87zi28f7cf.fsf@mouse.gnus.org> (raw)

Since, well, forever, Emacs has had several sources for information
about how to display files, like /etc/mailcap, ~/.mailcap and the
`mailcap-mime-data' variable.

But Emacs' handling of priorities here has never felt quite right, and
they have historical reasons: In olden days, some distributions put a
copy of /etc/mailcap into ~/.mailcap, so you didn't really know what the
system preferences were and what the user's preferences were.

So mailcap.el used the following precedence algorithm:

1) If it's in `mailcap-mime-data', use that.

2) If a specific type, say, "image/gif" is in both /etc/mailcap and
~/.mailcap, make the ~/.mailcap version win.

3) If we have less specific types covering the same type, make the most
specific win.  So if /etc/mailcap has "image/gif; xv" and ~/.mailcap has
"image/*; feh", then "image/gif" wins because it's more specific.

I don't really think this ever made much sense.  I think if the user has
put "image/*; feh" into ~/.mailcap, then that should win.

So I propose to make this change on master.  It's backward-incompatible,
but will lead to a lot less confusion in the years ahead.

What do all y'all think?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
   bloggy blog: http://lars.ingebrigtsen.no





             reply	other threads:[~2018-04-12 21:22 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 9+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2018-04-12 21:22 Lars Ingebrigtsen [this message]
2018-04-13  2:38 ` RFC: Make ~/.mailcap override other settings T.V Raman
2018-04-13 11:49   ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-13  2:54 ` Mark Oteiza
2018-04-13  8:21 ` joakim
2018-04-13 14:00 ` Eli Zaretskii
2018-04-13 15:40   ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-13 17:11   ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2018-04-14 12:32     ` Lars Ingebrigtsen

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