On Wed, 17 Feb 2021, at 18:22, Jehan Pagès wrote:
> I do agree it's not so much to start with. Anyway here is the recent report:
> https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/issues/6449
Thanks!
This particular user reports that *updating* GIMP causes the file association
to change. That definitely seems like a bug: I can understand that someone
might want a newly installed app to take over from the previous default, but
updating shouldn't affect it.
Reading the EndeavourOS thread about it, I think what's happening is that, with
no default application set, something takes the first application listed in a
mimeinfo.cache file as the default. It seems like an obvious thing to do. But
the man page for update-desktop-database (which generates that file) is clear
that you shouldn't:
> The order of the desktop files found for a MIME type is not
> significant. Therefore, an external mechanism must be used to determine what
> is the preferred desktop file for a MIME type.
The order of applications in that file is not even currently stable
(https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/desktop-file-utils/-/issues/3), so each
time it's regenerated you could get a different application. But simply sorting
them would probably put gimp before gwenview, so it wouldn't have the result
that user wants.
One way to address this is to ship a list of default apps - e.g. Fedora
associates image/jpeg with Eye of Gnome by default. Fedora appears to set this
regardless of desktop, but the mime-apps spec
(https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mime-apps-spec/1.0.1/ ) allows for both
desktop specific defaults and a sequence of defaults from which it will use the
first available.
The desktop could (should?) also make a deterministic choice even without a
default (e.g. sort the desktop files from mimeinfo.cache itself). It might be
the wrong choice, of course, but a consistent wrong choice and a clear way to
override it is less frustrating than something that might or might not go wrong
every time you update it.
Best wishes,
Thomas
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