GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 604825
Offer to install necessary packages when opening unsupported archive formats with Nautilus
Last modified: 2020-11-11 19:14:35 UTC
When you try to open an archive with a format that is not supported by your system, you will get an error message. This is confusing and doesn't explain very well how to solve the problem. The best solution would be an addition, similar to gstreamer-packagekit, that asks you if you want to install the necessary support packages. A possible problem could be the different gradations of support. Do you want to install, rar, unrar or maybe unrar-free? And what about formats that could have some issues with patents or principles? This bug was originally reported by cornbread on Launchpad in Ubuntu at <https://launchpad.net/bugs/487937>.
why did you changed the product back to Nautilus ? The archives are managed by file-roller.
Oops, apologises. I thought I had made a mistake by reporting it against file-roller in the first place, which was my initial idea. I wanted to report it against Nautilus, however, because that's the file manager, and double clicking e.g. a CAB file without the required additions installed doesn't open file-roller, but generates an error message instead, telling you there can't be an application found to open the file with.
Ah so this is a different problem, I was mistaken by the summary and the title. For information Nautilus has already packagekit support. I guess the problem is nor in nautilus neither in file-roller but rather in shared-mime-info.
I probably messed things up a bit when I reported this upstream. I used a file of the type 'application/vnd.ms-cab-compressed' to test the bug. However, although file-roller support 'application/x-cabinet', it doesn't support'application/vnd.ms-cab-compressed'. This is probably a different bug report, I'll look into that later. The reporter probably meant something like GNOME bug #482560 -- or at LP: <https://launchpad.net/bugs/148084> -- which applies to situations where the MIME-type is in the file-roller.desktop file, but support for it is not installed. This bug would only be valid if some archive formats would be added to the .desktop file by the separate packages providing the support, rather than being there already. I'm marking the upstream bug as a duplicate of the earlier mentioned downstream bug of the earlier mentioned GNOME bug #482560. I leave it up to you what to do with this bug. Thanks for your help.
bugzilla.gnome.org is being replaced by gitlab.gnome.org. We are closing all old bug reports and feature requests in GNOME Bugzilla which have not seen updates for a long time. If you still use file-roller and if you still see this bug / want this feature in a currently supported version of GNOME (currently that would be 3.38), then please feel free to report it at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/file-roller/-/issues/ Thank you for creating this report and we are sorry it could not be implemented (volunteer workforce and time is limited).