Audacious - OLD, PLEASE USE GITHUB DISCUSSIONS/ISSUES

What may work for Unity causes side-effects for MATE e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1074145

If anyone knows more details about the inode/directory MIME type, please assist.

Michael Schwendt wrote:

What may work for Unity causes side-effects for MATE e.g.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/1074145

If anyone knows more details about the inode/directory MIME type, please assist.

The side effect you bring up has been discussed already on the Arch Linux bug tracker [1] and was reported again more recently as #404. The decision to keep inode/directory in the .desktop file, was based on the guidelines in the freedesktop.org Desktop Entry Specification [2]:

The MimeType key is used to indicate the MIME Types that an application knows how to handle. It is expected that for some applications this list could become long. An application is expected to be able to reasonably open files of these types using the command listed in the Exec key.

There should be no priority for MIME Types in this field, or any form of priority in the desktop file. Priority for applications is handled external to the .desktop files.

Note especially the last sentence, "Priority for applications is handled external to the .desktop files." I think the problem here is that most of the desktop environments around have essentially no logic for determining the relative priority of different applications. Choosing Audacious because it comes before Nautilus in the dictionary, is just stupid. As Gaetan observed on the Arch Linux bug, GNOME/MATE should at least be intelligent enough to give priority to its own file manager when opening directories. And if it has no way to figure out which application should be the default for other MIME-types, it should display a list of the available applications and prompt the user to pick one. That is the only sane way to solve this, in my opinion.

As a side note, it's quite easy to change the default application, once you know how. XFCE has a nice GUI to do it. "xdg-mime default Thunar.desktop inode/directory" (or nautilus.desktop or whatever) should work no matter what DE you use.

[1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/30034
[2] http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s08.html

Also possibly worth noting is that this is not specific to Audacious. On my system, EasyTag also lists inode/directory as a supported MIME-type.

not specific to Audacious.

Yeah, I had pointed out EasyTAG and Baobab in the Fedora ticket as well. Querying the RPM metadata in the package repositories, more are found which are not file managers:

# repoquery --whatprovides 'mimehandler(inode/directory)' --qf '%{name}'|sort|uniq
anjuta
audacious
baobab
cervisia
decibel-audio-player
dolphin
easytag
emelfm2
enlightenment-data
filelight
git-cola
gwenview
k4dirstat
kde-baseapps
kdesvn
konqueror
mate-file-manager
monkeystudio
nautilus
nemo
pcmanfm
pcmanfm-qt
plasma-mobile
pogo
spacefm
Thunar

I'm also of the opinion that simply installing a package that advertises supporting the inode/directory MIME type ought not reassign the current file manager "automatically".