Re: MIME database

[julien lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu>]

Le 2017-11-28 10:24, ludo@gnu.org a écrit :
> Hello,
> 
> (Moving the discussions to guix-devel.)
> 
> brendan.tildesley@openmailbox.org skribis:
> 
>> I was wondering why my pdf documents were getting opened in Gimp by 
>> default instead of Evince, so I investigated xdg-open and found it 
>> uses mimeopen as a fallback, and packaged it. Turns out it didn't make 
>> a difference and the issue was simply that the generated 
>> mimedata.cache in xdg-mime-database had Gimp listed before Evince.
> 
> Oh, good catch.  Profile generation is sensitive to package order; so
> indeed, if GIMP comes first, it “wins.”
> 
>> I was also I little confused that xdg-mime-database produces so many 
>> conflicts with shared-mime-info. It's role appears to be to update the 
>> data in shared-mime-data and have it overshadow the original data when 
>>  conflicts are resolved during profile generation. Looks ugly seeing 
>> all those conflicts though.
> 
> I guess it’s OK in that users normally don’t want to install these
> packages at all, let alone installing both in the same profile.
> 
>> I had a look at Fedora's version. They just have a single 
>> shared-mime-data package that runs update-mime-database, but also they 
>> add a few changes to make Evince open pdf's instead of Gimp, among 
>> other changes.
>> 
>> This makes me feel that it's desirable for us to also tweak mimedata 
>> to make it more sensible -- Pdf's should open in a pdf reader before 
>> it opens in an image editor. It seems unrealistic to only tweak 
>> upstream projects to make all this mimedata mesh together perfectly to 
>> produce ideal default behaviour.
> 
> Right, so I think the immediate course of action here would be to patch
> GIMP’s MIME data so that it does not register as a PDF viewer.
> 
> If we stumble upon other issues like that, we can fix them similarly.

Thanks for investigating that.

Inkscape also wants to open pdf files ;)

> 
> How does that sound?
> 
> Thanks for investigating!
> 
> Ludo’.