Hi Enrico, thanks a lot for your email, you are touching something important.
Frankly speaking, mailcap is old. We are therefore stuck in a state where changing it is very difficult and involves taking decisions that are very "cleaving". What is our priority: portability ? compatibility ? ability to run on extermely low-powered processors ? Or are we ready to rewrite it, to innovate, to make major changes that may not be adopted by other distros, to replace it by something entirely different ? My own take on that problem is to make it "optional" instead of "standard", so that people can develop alternatives, or try to entirely live without it (probably using XDG as a replacement). One problem is that the mime-support ships /etc/mime.types, which is needed by many programs beyond the mailcap system. I proposed to move it to base-files and the answer was "I don't think it would be a good idea". So maybe we need a mime.types package, priority standard, that contains this single file. Or maybe you can help me to make Santiago change his mind. http://bugs.debian.org/787571 Second problem: I proposed on debian-devel to make mailcap optional in 2019 and the only answer I got was: "I don't really see a benefit to this." https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2019/08/msg00306.html Frankly speaking, this makes me fear that resistance can spark after I would have invested my time in working on it. (I also proposed to hijack /usr/bin/open so that Mac users would feel at home, but as you can guess, the answer was kind of "no", or more precisely: wait 5 years before seing it happen. Actually, I wish I had done it. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2014/04/msg00822.html) In summary, I think xdg-open could be the standard default on all systems even if they do not have a Destkop environment installed. Actually, xdg-open falls back on mailcap in these cases and I think that a bunch of tools are already calling xdg-open directly. So we would need a tool that draws information from /usr/share/applications instead of /usr/lib/mime, and voilà we would just have to make xdg-open aware of it. Thanks again for your thoughts; it is long overdue that the mailcap systems evolves and at least stops standing in the way of change. If I can count on your support and on Debian's benevolence, I am more than happy to push major changes. Have a nice week-end, Charles -- Charles Plessy Akano, Uruma, Okinawa, Japan Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://mastodon.technology/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy
