Re: MIME database

[brendan.tildesley@openmailbox.org]

ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hello,
>
> (Moving the discussions to guix-devel.)
>
> brendan.tildesley@openmailbox.org skribis:
>
[...]
>> 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.
>
> How does that sound?
>
Well, in my interpretation, the mime data just says that it's can handle PDF's, not necessarily that it's at PDF reader. If a PDF is opened with Gimp, it shows an interface for importing it as images, so I don't feel like it's a mistake for Gimp to mark it's self as being able to handle PDF's. If we make actual PDF readers have priority over Gimp somehow, Gimp will still be under the list of suggested applications when one right clicks on a *.pdf file in a file manager, but making this change would completely remove Gimp as an option. 

From the perspective of Gimp developers, they have no power to make Gimp's mimedata cause ideal behaviour on, because mimedata is simply not very versatile, so listing Gimp as being able to handle application/pdf isn't a mistake on their part.

The best solution might be to create mimeapps.list files that take precedence over mimeinfo.cache. I'm not sure which package it should go in though.