Re: dired-view-command-alist

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    1. Moving MIME-related files out of Gnus and eliminating the
    dependencies is a too drastic change.

Why do you think so?

    2. Mailcap may contain different commands for viewing a file.
    Before running one of them, dired should ask the user which command to run.
    Even if there is only one command, dired should ask for confirmation
    and allow the user to edit that command.

I agree.

    A user interface for that already exists in `dired-guess-default' in
    dired-x.el.  But there is one difference: dired uses ? and *
    to substitute file names in shell commands, while mailcap uses %s.

    Using %s instead of special markers ? and * in Dired shell commands
    might solve the problem of their ambiguity where the same symbol
    is used for the list of Dired file names or shell wildcards.

It might be a good solution, but this is a substantial incompatibility.
Not big enough that I should reject it immediately, but big enough
we need to see what other people think about the change.

What do others think?