On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 11:12:25PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote: > A patch providing this converter has been available for a few months > [1]. The mime-support maintainer just never got around to upload it or > even comment on it.
> The new mime support maintainer team, which took over the package just a > few days ago, did ask the release team, if it would be possible to still > apply this patch for wheezy [2]. > I think this should be the solution we should aim for and I would > appreciate if the release team could give the mime-support maintainers a > green light for the unstable upload. I agree that we should aim for such an automated, long-term solution. In the meantime, I think it's correct to say that evince has a release-critical bug. I think that the right thing for the evince maintainers to do is to upload the package *now* with re-added mime-support handling, and worry about dropping it only after mime-support .desktop support has proven itself - knowing that this may not happen in time for the wheezy release. (And if you disagree, well, it's an RC bug... so someone can upload an NMU for it...) > If the converter solution turns out to be too buggy or requires larger > changes, we have a simple contigency plan, i.e. just drop the converter > again. > I would really appreciate if we could try to fix this *whole* issue for > good for *wheezy*. Re-adding the mime file in evince can still be done > if the proper mime-support fix has not been done in say a month or two. >From the discussion so far, there are two issues that in the release managers' position, I would be concerned about seeing addressed before endorsing this as a solution for wheezy. - The .desktop format does not include an equivalent to the mailcap 'priority' field; it's not clear what the expected / desirable handling is when multiple packages provide .desktop files for the same mime type. The documented default priority is '5', which is probably a reasonable starting point, but there's still a loss of expressiveness that seems to require an extension of the .desktop file format (especially since priority values are meant to be per-mime-type). - It's not clear what the transitional behavior should be when a package includes both a .desktop file and a usr/lib/mime/packages file. There's no reliable way to associate the contents of the two files, so this probably ends up with duplicated entries in /etc/mailcap, possibly with small variations; just from a quick look on my system, I find that the libreoffice .desktop and mime files use quite different program invocations. This is of course exactly why we want to not maintain duplicate information in multiple files, but we should have a clear idea about which we expect to take precedence, and make sure this is implemented, so that users don't wind up with buggy behavior on their systems due to random ordering. If this update-mime change is accepted for wheezy, the transition will most definitely be ongoing at release time, so we really ought to get this right. But that's just my two cents; the release managers may have a different set of concerns. Either way, my recommendation to the GNOME maintainers is that if you think it's important to not have to re-add the mime file to evince for wheezy, you should participate in finding a solution to these issues and not regard it as the mime-support maintainer's problem to fix - which I have the impression has been the general approach up to this point. On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 03:43:10PM +0100, Adam D. Barratt wrote: > > If Steve and other members of the ctte consider such a tool as an > > approriate way to solve this bug, would the release team also > > acknowledge this approach or not? > If it's the solution that the TC decide on to resolve the issue, it > sounds like something we could work with, at least imho, from what I've > seen so far. I've CCed -release for any further comments, as I don't > know how many members of the team are following -ctte and/or this bug. Broadly speaking, I think the correct long-term solution is to first add support to update-mime for reading both .desktop files and mime files, and then to update policy to tell maintainers to use .desktop files instead of mime files. And I think it's better for Debian if we can get the first part done prior to the wheezy release. But I would like the release team to make their own determination of whether the patch that's currently up for consideration is of sufficient quality, and sufficiently safe, to be granted a freeze exception. > For clarity, the current proposal would be > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=35;filename=mime-support-desktop.patch;att=1;bug=497779 > , or something similar? Yes. The nascent mime-support maintenance team has also committed a patch to the repo at <http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/mime-support.git;a=summary>, probably best to reference the version there. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
