[Pkg-mc-devel] Bug#665763: Bug#665763: [mc] replace hardcoded applications in mc.ext with run-mailcap

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Mate,

in principle I perfectly agree to your position to use mailcaps.

On Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 08:43:04PM +0200, Mate Miklos wrote:
> Several applications are hardcoded into the default mc.ext, which could be 
> better handled by run-mailcap. Most of the hardcoded ones are not installed by 
> default, and/or have superior alternatives. Examples: the entire sound section 
> (eg. mpg123, ogg123),

ACK.

> mplayer for all videos (not even available in debian), 

Well, mplayer is in Debian since a long time (fortunately).

> gv for postscript (evince and okular could handle it via see %f),

Here we now are starting to face a problem.  Evince maintainers silently
decided to drop mime support.  You might like to read #658139 which has
some frustrating mail exchange also on debian-devel.  So in this respect
the complete trust on mailcap has some unfortunate cooincicence and this
needs to be handled with a grian of salt.  Perhaps the Debian
alternatives system might provide some better solution or MC should
perhaps find a way to fallback if the expected application is not
installed on the system.

> abiword and 
> gnumeric (most people use libreoffice instead).

I admit that these choices are a bit outdated these days.
 
> In fact, the entire mc.ext for finding suitable applications for opening files 
> is wrong, it should be "see %f" blindly for *everything* that has X bit unset 
> and try running the executable ones (too bad matching permissions is 
> impossible, so this cannot be implemened right now).

So I perfectly agree with the "see %f" approach but unfortunately bug
#658139 makes this a bit questionable for the time beeing.
 
> Also worth noting is that determining file types based on filenames is totally 
> wrong, but this mistake is so prevalent, that fighting against is is futile.

Fully ACK.  I guess mc has taken over this habit from Norton Commander
and there are OSes out there that are following this wrong approach but
under Linux we should rather use more robust mechanisms.  This should
be reported upstream.

Kind regards

       Andreas.
 

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