Re: [DISCUSSION, default settings] Using mailcap as default handler for opening file links

[Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com>]

On 12/02/2024 19:36, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> Max Nikulin writes:
> 
>> I believe, there are enough issues with mailcap implementation in Emacs,
>> but do we have some alternative?
[...]
> 
> I have been digging more on this issue recently, and I have found that
> Carsten once attempted to tweak this default to use xdg-mime:

Have you faced another issue with mailcap? Frankly speaking, I am unsure 
what particular issues we are going to address (file type, Emacs and Org 
versions, OS).

Did you intentionally mentioned "xdg-mime"? While xdg-open tries to find 
suitable .desktop file to open a file, xdg-mime is more close to the 
file(1) tool, but it consults signatures from shared-mime-info and 
site&user config files. In addition, unlike file(1), it uses file 
extensions to guess media type.

An advantage of mailcap.el is that it should allow users have 
Emacs-specific Emacs-wide configuration for viewers. In principle it 
should be more reliable when invoking emacs through xdg-open when Emacs 
is configured as a handler for some media types.

Is it necessary to modify Org? Maybe an alternative is to add "xdg-open 
%s" for */* to `mailcap-user-mime-data'.

> I believe that xdg-open issue has been fixed by you in
> https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git/commit/?id=5db61eb0f
> org.el: Avoid xdg-open silent failure

I am still not really comfortable due to the strategy to start external 
processes diverged from methods used in browse-url.el.

I have not had a look into xdg.el yet.