Re: Breaking programs because a not yet implemented solution exists in theory (Was: Bug#658139: evince: missing mime entry)
+++ Andreas Tille [2012-02-01 09:56 +0100]:
> Hi Josselin,
>
> > To break such a chicken/egg circle, we
> > needed either to write the program ourselves, or to simply drop support
> > for the obsolete mime system.
>
> Somehow I missed an announcement that mime is obsolete and not supported
> in Debian any more.
Me too - this is the first I've heard of it
> > And since, after seven months, nothing happened, it means no one is
> > interested enough, although some one-liners doing half of the job have
> > been circulating.
>
> Well, from my perspective I was bored the first time when xpdf came up
> when I was expecting evince.
Same here. I recently noticed that I got epdfview instead of evince -
but they are much of a muchness, so I put this down to testing
randomness, or probably this new pdf reader 'stealing' the
application/pdf config. I've always been rather confused about the
interactions between the different application/filetype config systems
(and mc has it's own too) and irritating breakage is not exactly
unheard-of.
It wasn't at all obvious that the actual reason was a conspiracy to
remove mime file support from evince. Now that I know about it, I'm
not very impressed. Andreas has already expressed this annoyance so I
won't say it again.
As a packager I've been adding mime info recently to my packages so
that they work properly everywhere. I thought that's what packaging
(in Debian at least) was about.
I'm happy if someone can write an automagic tool for maintainers that
aren't going to support mime files any longer. But us mutt+mc types
really do still use this functionality every day. It doesn't look
obsolete to me, even if it has been superceded on the desktop. (And it
would be nice as a packager not to have to write this info down twice
in different approximately-equivalent formats).
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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