Gnome does not respect defaults.list hierarchy

[Carl-Erik Kopseng]

Gnome maintains three files to choose which program is associated with each mime type:

$HOME/local/share/applications/defaults.list
/usr/local/share/applications/defaults.list
/usr/share/applications/defaults.list (symlinked to /etc/gnome/defaults.list)

According to the System Administraion Guide, Section 5, the precedence hierarchy should be as above - the local versions taking priority over system-wide settings.

As this discussion explains to depth, this is not the case:
 http://ge.ubuntuforums.com/showthread.php?p=5718348#post5718348

For instance, specifying in the Properties dialog of an pdf file that it should open with Adobe Reader works, but it does not work when pressing a pdf file in Firefox' download windows (Evince opens). The only way to change this, is by changing the file /usr/local/share/applications/defaults.list, even though both /usr/share/applications/defaults.list and the ~/.local/... file has the right settings.

The assigned package above is probably wrong, though...

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

thank you for your bug report. what ubuntu version do you use? is the issue specific to firefox? seems to be a firefox bug

[Carl-Erik Kopseng (kopseng)]

I use the latest official version: 8.04 on amd64
uname -a: Linux acer64bit 2.6.24-21-generic

It is correct that I have only experienced it with Firefox, but thought it might rely on something deeper in the system, so that's why I wrote Gnome. But, yeah, it probably is a Firefox bug.

[Carl-Erik Kopseng (kopseng)]

According to this discussion, the problem is shared among several applications:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=831690

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

right, that's because the new gio uses a new mimeapps.list file to specify associations and gnome-vfs doesn't use it, so only applications using gio will get the change. reassigning to gnome-vfs, not sure if gnome-vfs will be changed since applications are quickly being ported to gio