Original report: http://bugs.debian.org/525155 - Stefano Zacchiroli

When there are no evince instances running, invoking "evince FILE"
will spawn a new evince, and wait for its window to be closed before
returning control to the invoker.

When there is an evince instance already running, invoking "evince
FILE" returns immediately. This breaks console applications, like
mutt, which rely on the returning executable to understand that the
viewing of FILE is over (and hence the temporary file, if this is the
case, can be deleted).

I understand that this is because evince reuses processes and "attach"
to the pre-existing process if there is one. But still the invoking
client can be made to wait instead of quitting, maybe with an
additional command line flag that can be declared for the evince
instance in mailcap? Otherwise as a mailcap reader for PDF, evince is
pretty broken at the moment, at least for apps like mutt.