therning.org/ magnus

ArchLinux was my Linux distro of choice for a short time. It’s lean and it’s mean, but in the end I just found it to be a little bit too rough around the edges and I ended up back at Debian (Sid).

This page contains the results of my short “Arch stint”. Don’t expect any updates to it, ever. If you are interested I’ll be happy to hand it over to someone who cares about mailcap and mime in ArchLinux. Send me an email.

Mime and mailcap

ArchLinux doesn’t come with proper /etc/mailcap and /etc/mime files. This means that several applications I use, muttng being the most important, can’t live up to their potential. Inspired by Debian’s update-mime I put together a tool and two Arch packages (al-mime and al-mime-data). The idea is simple, a package that wants to add an entry to /etc/mailcap drops a file in /usr/share/packages (more specifically it should drop a file in packages/ under any directory included in XDG_DATA_DIRS). Then it should call al-mime in its post_install, post_upgrade and post_remove. The .install in al-mime-data looks like this:

# arg 1:  the new package version
post_install() {
     [ -x /usr/bin/al-mime ] && /usr/bin/al-mime
}

# arg 1:  the new package version
# arg 1:  the new package version
# arg 2:  the old package version
post_upgrade() {
    [ -x /usr/bin/al-mime ] && /usr/bin/al-mime
}

# arg 1:  the old package version
post_remove() {
    [ -x /usr/bin/al-mime ] && /usr/bin/al-mime
}

op=$1
shift
$op $*