GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 554563
can't open pdf when shared-mime-info is not installed
Last modified: 2017-07-19 16:00:56 UTC
the bug has been described on https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evince/+bug/208729 "On Ubuntu Hardy Beta Server Edition and Ubuntu 8.04.1, evince-gtk cannot open any pdf files. The error message it gives: Unable to open document Unhandled MIME type: “application/octet-stream” After installing shared-mime-info package the problem disappears." When the mimetype informations are not available evince should probably use the filename to determine the mimetype rather than displaying an error
We are using g_file_query_info and g_content_type_guess from gio, so I think this is a gio issue.
Not a bug. We have to get mime information from somewhere... it is a distribution bug if the glib package doesn't requires shared-mime-info
Right, I agree that glib needs to get the data from somewhere; it's unfortunate that we're pulling this relatively large dep now. It's quite hard to tell whether an app linked to glib will use shared-mime-info data, so we have to pull it in all cases. However error handling in evince is missing a couple of things: - result_uncertain isn't used - evince has fallback code, but this code checks for a return value of NULL while glib returns "binary/octet-stream" when the content type can not be guessed (for instance when shared-mime-info isn't installed) Also, I wonder whether the return value of glib should be advertized in its documentation and exposed via a define?
there is still an evince issue there
it can't open pdf in lenny+lenny1 including w/ shared-mime-info installed Debian Bug #518664 Solved after removed ~/.local/share/mime/mime.cache
I don't see anyone doing any work on this. evince, and a large number of GNOME applications handling files depend on shared-mime-info being present. It's about 2 megs installed.