[Portland-bugs] [Bug 23280] New: xdg-open should use xdg-mime instead of run-mailcap when no DE detected

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23280

           Summary: xdg-open should use xdg-mime instead of run-mailcap when
                    no DE detected
           Product: Portland
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: Linux (All)
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: xdg-utils
        AssignedTo: portland-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: thestig at google.com


Upstreaming https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xdg-utils/+bug/220765

Original report:
----
When no desktop environment is detected, xdg-open falls back to a generic
mechanism based on run-mailcap. This is rather limited as it depends on file
extensions. It would seem better to use file or probably xdg-mime to choose how
to open the file.

The mime type could be fetched with:

file --mime "$1"

and extracted from the output and prepended to the filename before passing to
run-mailcap.

However, it looks to me like a better option would be to use xdg-mime, since
xdg-mime query default "$1" will give you the default application to open the
file.
----


IMO, xdg-mime does a better job of figuring out what program to open a given
file with. xdg-mime also uses defaults.list, which might be part of a fd.o
spec? OTOH, run-mailcap is a Debian-ism that doesn't exist on all distros. Thus
in open_generic(), we should try to use xdg-mime first before falling back to
run-mailcap.


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