winemenubuilder - MIME type handling GSoC - bad idea

[Damjan Jovanovic]

Hi

I welcome this discussion.

Of course manually deleting files in ~/.local is not user friendly,
and it was never intended to be done that way.

I did not write the part of the Wiki entry suggesting that applet :-).
If you install a Windows app on Windows, and it creates menus and file
associations, you don't get to opt out, and have to use a 3rd party
tool to edit or delete those afterwards. If you install a Linux app on
Linux, and it creates menus and file associations, you also don't get
to opt out, and have to use a 3rd party tool (a Freedesktop
menu/association editing tool) to edit or delete those afterwards. Why
is Wine so special?

What are people actually looking for? For Wine not to create
menu/associations when running on a non-"~/.wine" WINEPREFIX? For a
way to stop the annoying use of Wine's "Internet Explorer" to open
jpeg files? Anything else?

BTW you don't need distro binfmt handlers to double-click .exe (and
.msi and .lnk) files: Wine's tools/wine.desktop handles those. You
only need binfmt handlers to run .exe directly from the command line -
when you aren't in a desktop where you can use "xdg-open
/path/to/file.exe". I suspect the Ubuntu package installs a binfmt
handler because it doesn't know that.

Regards
Damjan

On Sun, Mar 15, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Michael Müller <michael at fds-team.de> wrote:
> Hi Damjan,
>
> the idea of the GSOC project is to make the mime type association more
> user friendly for ordinary users. Manually deleting files in
> ~/.local/share/mime/ (which some users don't even find because it is a
> hidden folder) or requiring a 3rd party program is not user friendly. If
> Wine creates these associations it should also provide you with a way to
> get rid of them. Even the wiki entry mentions that an applet would be
> useful to manage these associations.
>
> There is also no obvious way to disable the integration, there is no
> checkbox or something like this in winecfg, you will need to lookup that
> winemenubuilder is the component responsible for this and disable it
> manually with library overrides. We are talking about users who use wine
> by double clicking on an executable (using the binfmt handler installed
> by their distro) or by using a menu entry and who wonder why all their
> txt files now open with notepad and how to get rid of this.
>
> There is also no easy and obvious way to create mime types only for a
> specific program, i.e. disable the integration but later decide to
> enable it only for Word and .doc* files. There might be different
> solutions for this problem, but I think you can't deny that there is
> something going wrong if you get a bug report with 72 comments and 4
> duplicates. Arguing that providing a way to disable the integration
> again would be a new feature and not a bug fix doesn't help us in this
> case. If you have better ideas how to make the integration more user
> friendly, feel free to share them with us, but your comments didn't
> convince me so far that this GSOC idea is bad.
>
> Maybe Rosanne can share her opinion on this topic, since she has more
> contact with users complaining about this "feature".
>
> Regards,
> Michael
>
> Am 15.03.2015 um 11:02 schrieb Damjan Jovanovic:
>> Hi
>>
>> As the author of most of winemenubuilder, I am disappointed at how
>> poorly understood it remains.
>>
>> The "Winecfg / winemenubuilder - enhance MIME type handling" GSoC idea
>> suggests "The idea of this task is to provide a GUI (most probably as
>> part of winecfg) to control the creation of such MIME type assignments
>> and therefore making Wine more user friendly."
>>
>> If you read about the design of winemenubuilder's file associations on
>> http://wiki.winehq.org/FileTypesIntegration you'll see that
>> winemenubuilder logs each file association mapping to the registry on
>> creation, and doesn't recreate it if it's already in the registry and
>> the .desktop file is gone. This allows you not just to customize and
>> delete file associations by editing the registry, but also by editing
>> the Freedesktop associations (and menus btw) with Freedesktop tools -
>> .desktop files you've deleted in those tools won't be recreated by
>> Wine (unless you uninstall and reinstall the Windows app).
>>
>> I believe people have been spoiled by installing everything through
>> their distro package manager, and thus don't know about/use
>> Freedesktop menu/association editing tools, so they now expect Wine to
>> do something that even Windows doesn't.
>>
>> If Freedesktop tools don't let you edit file associations, surely
>> that's a missing feature in those tools, not a GSoC project in Wine?
>> Additionally Windows apps for editing menus and file associations
>> (example list at http://forums.techarena.in/tips-tweaks/989159.htm)
>> should work under Wine.
>>
>> Thank you
>> Damjan
>>
>