zathura: appears multiple times for pdf documents in application list in file browsers 'open with' menu

[sebo505]

Please confirm there isn't an open report for this package

• I have searched through packaging problem reports

Version

zathura, Version: 0.5.14, Release: 29

Summary of the problem

When I right-click a pdf document in Nautilus and click on open with, zathura appears 5 times in the list of applications.
I have zathura and zathura-mupdf installed.

I figured that the zathura package alone provides 4 different desktop files:
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-ps.desktop
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-cb.desktop
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-djvu.desktop
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura.desktop

Additionally, zathura-mupdf provides
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-pdf-mupdf.desktop
and zathura-poppler provides
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-pdf-poppler.desktop

More information

[Jaredy899]

I'm going to work on updating zathura soon. But these are plugins that are shipped upstream and if we mess with them, they could break default app association so likely there's not much we can do about it.

[sebo505]

So, let me see if I understand the situation correctly:
Zathura offers plugins. Theses plugins add support for specific file formats.
The system needs a desktop file with the mime type association so that the system knows zathura can open those files.
So, installing a plugin like zathura-mupdf installs a additional desktop file for the file association.

Ideally, there was only one desktop file which would get edited or something by a post-install-script when installing/removing a plugin. Not familiar enough with packaging myself to judge if this is possible, though.

BUT, as our main zathura package already seems to provide plugins for ps, cb, djvu, at least it provides those desktop files
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-ps.desktop
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-cb.desktop
/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-djvu.desktop

wouldn't it at least be sensible to add the mime types for those files to the zathura main desktop file and not install the other 3 desktop files?

[sebo505]

https://man.archlinux.org/man/desktop-file-edit.1.en

That would be cool:

[--add-mime-type
Add MIME-TYPE to the list of MIME types (key MimeType). If MIME-TYPE was already present
in the list, this operation is a no-op.

[--remove-mime-type
Remove MIME-TYPE from the list of MIME types (key MimeType). If MIME-TYPE was not present
in the list, this operation is a no-op.

[Jaredy899]

I can look into it and see if it makes sense to us. When mupdf updates to 1.28 (hopefully any day), I'll also update zathura since I'll have to rebuild it anyway.

[sebo505]

I was playing around a bit. I think this isn't practical for zathura-mupdf and zathura-poppler. These are separate packages and bring their own desktop files to inform the system about the Mime types they support. These packages/plugins might or might not be installed along zathura main package.

However, for the zathura main package I was able to reduce the number of desktop files to 1 instead of 4 by editing package.yml as following:

• adding desktop-file-utils to builddeps
• at the end of install section, add:

    # Reduce number of desktop files for zathura main package from 4 to 1
    # Add Mime types from additional plugin desktop files to zathura main desktop file
    desktop-file-edit --add-mime-type="$(grep '^MimeType=' ${installdir}/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-{ps,cb,djvu}.desktop | cut -d= -f2 | tr ';' '\n' | sort -u | tr '\n' ';' | sed 's/;$//')" ${installdir}/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura.desktop
    # Remove plugin desktop files
    rm ${installdir}/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-ps.desktop ${installdir}/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-cb.desktop ${installdir}/usr/share/applications/org.pwmt.zathura-djvu.desktop

This way, the mime types from the plugin-desktop files for ps/cb/djvu/ get added to the zathura main desktop file, and the corresponding plugin desktop files (the one that are included in zathura main eopkg) get removed.

This way, having zathura and zathura-mupdf installed, you still have 2 zathura entries in open-with list, which is still not optimal. But way less weird than 5.