Re: Recent Emacs doesn't respect my mailcap

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>
>> Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
>>
>>> Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net> writes:
>>>
>>>> In my use case, I've already told Gnus to view the PDF externally by
>>>> using `gnus-article-view-part-externally'. Given that, and the fact that
>>>> I've specified an external viewer in ~/.mailcap, it seems a little
>>>> perverse that I'm still stuck seeing it in Doc View. If I wanted to do
>>>> that, I could have just called `gnus-article-view-part'!
>>>
>>> That does sound like a bug.  Perhaps that command should filter out all
>>> Lisp functions from `mailcap-mime-data'?
>>
>> Or put ~/.mailcap stuff at the front of the list, or maybe just don't
>> re-sort mailcap-mime-data. I don't think anything fancy needs to be done
>> -- it should be enough just to *not* mess with mailcap-mime-data.
>
> The `-externally' command should work different from the other command,
> shouldn't it?  Otherwise, what's the point of having two of these
> commands?

Good point!

> This code is so old it's hard to remember what the rationale for all
> this may have been.  Perhaps people used to have huge ~/.mailcap files
> installed by other programs, and that meant that all the nice internal
> Emacs commands for dealing with stuff never got called?

I really have no idea. Also, how does this interact with xdg/mimeapps
stuff? For handling external applications, I basically tell Emacs to
always use xdg-open, and then do the actual configuration in
~/.config/mimeapps.list, that way I'm using the same applications
system-wide.

But I think you're right, this code is probably tuned to the desktop as
it existed a decade ago...