Package: xfce4-session Version: 4.16.0-1 Severity: wishlist X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-desktop@lists.debian.org
xfce4-session installs an essentially empty template file "debian/defaults.list" as a conffile /etc/xfce4/defaults.list, with a symbolic link at /usr/share/xfce4/applications/defaults.list to get applications to read it. From the changelog, it appears that this was intended to give sysadmins a way to configure MIME type associations for XFCE users without affecting users of other desktops. This is using pre-2014 locations for this configuration, and there are better ways to achieve the same goals now. MIME handler associations are specified in the freedesktop.org MIME applications specification (https://specifications.freedesktop.org/mime-apps-spec/latest/), which no longer mentions defaults.list. Several implementations of that spec, such as the one in GLib, still load defaults.list as an additional data source, as a non-standard extension to the spec. The post-2014 way for this to work is that if sysadmins want to set MIME type associations for XFCE users, they should create /etc/xdg/xfce-mimeapps.list and put configuration there. This will be read by default by any correct implementation of the mime-apps spec, without requiring symbolic links in /usr/share. It will also work for any desktop environment, not just XFCE: the prefix of the filename is whatever the desktop environment puts in the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP environment variable, folded to lower case (for example xfce, gnome, kde). One way that Debian's XFCE packaging could deprecate /etc/xfce4/defaults.list would be to add a comment to its default version, indicating that it is deprecated and per-desktop configuration should be done by creating /etc/xdg/xfce-mimeapps.list. Another way to do this would be to rename /etc/xfce4/defaults.list to /etc/xdg/xfce-mimeapps.list during upgrades, and remove the /usr/share/xfce4/applications/defaults.list symbolic link. However, this would require the maintainer script to be able to do something reasonable if /etc/xdg/xfce-mimeapps.list already exists. If this is the only reason why XFCE adds /usr/share/xfce4 to XDG_DATA_DIRS, then removing the /usr/share/xfce4/applications/defaults.list symbolic link would allow debian/55xfce4-session to be dropped (but I don't know whether there are other integration files in /usr/share/xfce4 that need to be in the XDG_DATA_DIRS search path). smcv
