1226829 - Adjusting Applications to Mimetypes is exceedingly difficult, inconsistent

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[miltonh26]

Attachment: Screenshot from 2015-11-21 11-50-48.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.86 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Set the application (or not) to use when opening email attachments
Edit Menu --> Preferences --> Attachments tab
Trying to fix PDF's opening in Document Viewer (Ubuntu 15.10) and not LibreOffice. 


Actual results:

Background info: 
TB profiles folder with all my email is located on a different partition than the default location installed in the home folder. I change profiles.ini to point to the partition containing my emails and am not using the default folder setup when TB was installed. I've been doing this for years without incident. But this time when setting up a fresh install of Ubuntu 15.10 with TB 38.3 it didn't work. Some of the assigned applications for mimetypes worked, others didn't and in particular for PDF files where Libreoffice was always defaulted too despite the settings.

The Preferences dialog box shows the assigned mimetype for PDF is correct (see screenshot), but LibreOffice is always called rather than Document Viewer (envince). I also tried changing the application assigned for PDFs, by changing the mimetype.rdf file by hand, and TB seems to ignore the changes and is acting inconsistently. Please see attached file "mimetype.rdf". 

Maybe my mimetype.rdf file is not structured correctly?

The GUI interface for changing mimetypes is missing functionality:
1. Cannot delete mimetypes from the Content Type list
2. Cannot add missing mimetypes to the Content Type list
3. Cannot change or adjust the assigned mimetype from the dialog box
4. Changes are not always picked up setting changes
5. Many common mimetypes are missing, such as for ".png", ".tiff", ".bmp", others...

A fresh install of Ubuntu 15.10 with TB did not install mimetype.rdf in the default TB folder when TB was first run.

Finally, the XML file format of mimetype.rdf is really hard to work with. There is duplication in how a mimetype is assigned. The file is well  structured for XML, but the formatting is hard to read and edit. Some <RDF:Description> tags are closed with </RDF:Description> and others are <RDF:Description ... />rendering the file hard to read. Better would be write the file in a consistent manner using the <RDF:Description>...</RDF:Description> with consistent tabbing and spacing. Simplification is in order of the overall scheme used for the file. 


Expected results:

The Preferences interface for assigning an application to a mimetype should follow the settings. More flexibility of settings would be very helpful.

Comment 1

[miltonh26]

Attachment: mimeTypes.rdf