Upgraded a Lenny desktop to sid as of today (versions as
per this report). As a result, postscript and PDF files
now open by default with GIMP.

Evince was installed prior to the upgrade and remained
installed after. Evince used to be the default application
for these filetypes.

I don't think it ever makes sense for GIMP to be the
default handler for PDF or PS files, even if it can import
them and do something with them in a raster context.

Hi,

I stomped on these reports by chance, and since I know why this is
happening, I thought I’d give some explanations.

The MIME associations in gnome-vfs and gio used to look for defaults in
the hardcoded /usr/share/gnome/applications/defaults.list. However the
default should not be the same when you are running GNOME, XFCE or LXDE,
all of which use the same MIME system.

This is why this defaults.list is now contained in gnome-session, which
also sets XDG_DATA_DIRS accordingly so that file is used by any
application when running a GNOME session. When not using gnome-session,
the system chooses the first application in lexical order.

Now, XFCE and LXDE will probably ship their own defaults.list sooner or
later. As for those running a custom session, this is another story. The
XDG MIME system is seriously lacking a priority setting which could be
used to select the most appropriate application. We could ship a
distribution-wide defaults.list, but it would have to be autogenerated
based on some heuristics; this would be a package on its own, that would
need to be cared about.

Cheers,

severity 525077 minor
thanks

Given the following reasons, I don't consider this bug any higher than
minor:
- this is not actually gimp's fault, but rather a limitation in XDG MIME
for not providing priorities
- a very small percentage of people are affected by this bug - those
using a file manager designed for use in a desktop environment but no
desktop session is run that sets an appropriate XDG_DATA_DIRS
- the workaround is pretty easy - install gnome-session-common and
export XDG_DATA_DIRS=/usr/share/gnome:/usr/local/share/:/usr/share/ at
the beginning of the X session.

(for an explanation of bug severities, see
http://www.debian.org/Bugs/Developer#severities)

Based on user feedback from a XFCE user, I think this bug
still affects XFCE and probably LXDE, despite what Ari said.

Since this really hurts the usability of those desktops, I
have removed gnome from both tasks, in tasksel git. It remains
in the Gnome and KDE tasks.

I can confirm this for Xfce and it's really annoying. IMHO gimp should offer
PDF for opening at all.

FYI, this should change your default association without using nautilus
or some other GUI:

xdg-mime default evince.desktop application/pdf

Would you please fix this bug? This bug is several years old and still
not fixed. Additionally, there are several other bug-reports, which are
complaining about this bug.
What's the problem? You just need to remove the pdf-line from
/usr/share/applications/gimp.desktop

Greets,
bigbog

This is still happening in Wheezy. For some reason, I had this working
for a while, and it broke, maybe through the squeeze/wheezy upgrade.

I originally thought this was related with #658139, but I actually
have a .desktop file for evince, so that is a different problem.

A.

Unfortunately, since this bug is still open, and still affects xfce,
gimp is no longer included in the default desktop install.

I hope this bug can be fixed.

Closing in favor of #525077 since the BTS won't let me merge them.

This bug is still affecting me in Debian Stretch under XFCE.

Bug is present on Debian Buster (I have no DE)

I understand that associating gimp with pdf is correct. So this isn't a bug in
gimp, or at most "wishlist". However, opening gimp by default instead of a pdf
viewer, has a "grave" impact on usability for desktop users. It is even so
"grave" that I can imagine that users switch to another Linux distro. In my
view very few users want to open a pdf with gimp, and many users want to open a
pdf with the local pdf viewer, if any available. So an easy change making many
desktop users happy, would be by removing the association between gimp and pdf.
At least for now, until a better solution is found. Let's compare with other
programs capable of opening pdf files: libreoffice isn't included in
/etc/mailcap. I would like to see gimp follow that example.