Subject: Re: bug#18132: Time for a smarter dired-guess-shell-alist-default? (dired-x.el)

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2021 16:20:16 +0300

> From: Reuben Thomas <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2021 14:06:27 +0100
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>, [email-masked]
> 
> I agree with Eli that mailcap is not the right tool for the job.

(Then why are we still talking about 'file'?)

> file's MIME-type support is easy to fix for types that don't (yet) have a MIME type supplied; file is actively
> maintained and frequently released.

Not sure it will help.  Example:

  $ file --mime-type -k -b lisp/international/uni-bidi.el
  application/octet-stream

Looks like there are some fundamental problems in 'file' that make it
not ideal for this purpose, to say the least.  Which, to me, just
reiterates what I already said up-thread: we should allow users to
override what the system-level tools provide, because they will never
be 100% satisfactory for our needs.