Bug#1055894: bookworm-pu: package gnome-session/43.0-1+deb12u1

Simon McVittie smcv at debian.org
Mon Nov 13 19:01:39 GMT 2023


Package: release.debian.org
Severity: normal
Tags: bookworm
User: release.debian.org at packages.debian.org
Usertags: pu
X-Debbugs-Cc: gnome-session at packages.debian.org, debian-gtk-gnome at lists.debian.org
Control: affects -1 + src:gnome-session

Please consider including my recent gnome-session upload in Debian 12.3.

[ Reason ]
Open text files in gnome-text-editor if gedit is not installed,
fixing https://bugs.debian.org/1055838

[ Impact ]
If not fixed, in a default task-gnome-desktop installation, plain text
files (including XML, CSS, various programming languages, etc.) default
to being opened in Libreoffice Writer (a word processor), and not in
GNOME Text Editor (a text editor) as intended.

Mitigation: if the system was upgraded from Debian 11, it will probably
still have the gedit package installed. If so, plain text files will open
in gedit by default, which is an entirely reasonable choice too.

For context, GNOME Text Editor is a simple text editor like Windows
Notepad, whereas gedit is more of a programmers' editor; which one gets to
open text files by default if both are installed is a matter of opinion
and taste, but the default on a GNOME desktop ought to be one of those two,
and certainly not a word processor.

[ Tests ]
Manually tested:
* Start from a Debian 12 VM with task-gnome-desktop and no other desktop
  environments
* Ensure gedit is *not* installed (by default, it will not be)
* echo "Hello, world!" > ~/Documents/hello.txt
* nautilus ~/Documents
* Right-click hello.txt
    * Good result: the top choice is "Open With Text Editor [Return]"
    * Bad result: the top choice is "Open With LibreOffice Writer [Return]"
* After verifying good result with the proposed gnome-session installed,
  additionally install gedit
* Right-click hello.txt
    * Good result: the top choice is "Open With gedit [Return]"
    * Bad result: anything else

[ Risks ]
Low risk: no code change, just adjusting desktop-specific defaults for
GNOME (including derivatives like Budgie and GNOME Flashback).

To minimize observable behaviour changes for systems that were already
upgraded from Debian 11 to 12, I have chosen to make gedit the default
text editor for GNOME if happens to be installed (no change for upgraded
systems), falling back to GNOME Text Editor if gedit is not present
(a fresh task-gnome-desktop installation will use this fallback in practice).
This is the opposite of my recent upload to unstable, where I made
gnome-text-editor higher priority (I think it's reasonable to expect the
default text editor to change in a major-version upgrade).

[ Checklist ]
  [x] *all* changes are documented in the d/changelog
  [x] I reviewed all changes and I approve them
  [x] attach debdiff against the package in (old)stable
  [x] the issue is verified as fixed in unstable

[ Changes ]
d/gnome-mimeapps.list: Fix the bug. It might be helpful to know that
values after the equals sign in mimeapps.list are semicolon-delimited
lists, and canonically end with a single semicolon after the last item
(but it's optional and frequently omitted, particularly for single-item
lists).

d/gbp.conf: administrivia since this is the first Debian 12 update proposed
for this package.
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