Re: What is "audio/x-wav D)download or C)cancel" anyway?

[Theodore Kilgore <kilgota banach math auburn edu>]

On Tue, 3 Sep 2013, Andrew Borodin wrote:

> On Mon, 2 Sep 2013 19:41:17 -0500 (CDT) Theodore Kilgore wrote:
> > and why do I get a black screen with this mysterious message at the bottom 
> > when I am attempting to play a WAV file in MC running in a terminal (not 
> > in X!)? And, of course, I just get this message, no music. What in the 
> > world is happening, here?
>
> MC supports system-wide file bindings using xdg-open.
>
> > Just upgraded to Slackware Current on my old eeepc netbook, decided to 
> > play a piece of music afterward to relax, and I confronted this.
> >
> > I looked into the extension editor, and it says about wav files and other 
> > sound files that it follows what is in /usr/libexec/mc/ext.d/sound.sh
> >
> > That file does not seem to contain anything of the kind. It says it is 
> > going to use "play" in the terminal (which is what I expected) and it says 
> > it wants to use "xmms" in X.
>
> Look at the end of sound.sh:
>
> 86 open)
> 87     "${MC_XDG_OPEN}" "${MC_EXT_FILENAME}" 2>/dev/null || \
> 88         do_open_action "${filetype}"
>
> To disable xdg-open in mc, you can define MC_XDG_OPEN=/bin/false.

Andrew,

I suppose I can do that. But, OTOH what exactly am I supposed to do 
actually to make this "xdg-open" actually to do its work and not to go 
crazy instead?

It occurs to me that the problem I had on my main computer a few months 
ago was somehow similar, in that a recent upgrade of MC on the main 
computer was adopting the crazy and extremely inconvenient practice of 
trying to open everything using the web browser, no matter what the file 
was and no matter whether I had an appropriate application installed on 
the computer or not. It seemed at the time that something was suddenly 
needed which had never been needed before, and was not specifically 
explained in any related documentation. We had a discussion about this, 
and it was suggested to create a $HOME/.mime.types file and to put stuff 
in it as needed.

I also corresponded with Patrick Volkerding about this and asked him what 
the problem was. He said, essentially, that there is not supposed to be 
any problem, and probably he is right if one were doing a fresh and clean 
install. There is, he averred, support for mime types in Slackware. The 
problem thus seems to boil down to xdg-open trying to look in some default 
location for that information, and on an older and previously running 
system that particular, default location might not be present because 
whatever software package it happens to be in was never needed for 
anything at all on that particular machine. The man 
page for xdg-open does not provide any enlightenment about this either. 
So, do you happen to know exactly where the information is supposed to be 
which xdg-open is supposed to find, so that xdg-open can be stopped from 
going crazy and forcing every file to be opened in the browser if one is 
in an X session, and other really weird stuff to happen if one is in a 
terminal? What application is it that I do not have installed on the 
netbook which it is somehow just assumed that everybody has installed, on 
which xdg-open is relying?

Theodore Kilgore