Comment 3 for bug 1403717

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Scott Cowles Jacobs (scott092707) wrote :

How, exactly, are we to attract new users to Linux, if Evince/Apparmor puts up an incomprehensible error message for a simple lack of file extension (in this case), or bombs completely if a user has a non-standard partition scheme (most data files in a partition outside "/" (a previous Evince/Apparmor bug/feature that I encountered).

A new user is just going to try to bring up a .pdf file that his health insurance marketplace sent him, and Evince is going to fail to do so.

He is not going to know anything about AppArmor, or that that is why his (perfectly good) file won't display.

Assuming that AppArmor is actually a good thing to have (what it does has escaped me so far), then it needs to have more flexible defaults, especially where potential new users are concerned.
If it is somehow VITAL that a document program have a ".pdf" extension,
then we should have GIMP and LibreOffice and Chromium (etc.) also fail with the same incomprehensible error message when confronted with a .pdf file without ".pdf".

Apparently, Evince/AppArmor is more concerned with what the file name is, than whether the file is a proper .pdf file, which the other programs have no trouble decoding.

You seem to feel that this is not a bug.

It is, at the very least, an over-sensitivity to an omission that for many (most?) programs, is no problem at all.

-Scott