Workaround for an annoying Firefox "feature" in *nix

[Walter Dnes]

  In the old days, we had to manually type in the program name to use
for "helper applications".  Nowadays, Windows and Mac standards seem to
have taken over.  Big brother knows what good for you, and you can only
use an annoying file-picker dialogue.  What's even worse is that the
dialog *FORCIBLY DE-REFERENCES SYMLINKS*.  I download a specific CSV
file from the web regularly with Firefox.  When I first tried
downloading it, I was asked which program to use.  I pointed the file
picker at /usr/bin/gnumeric which was a symlink that pointed to
/usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.3  But because Firefox is so bleeping "user
friendly", it de-referenced the symlink to /usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.3

  Fast-forward a few weeks.  A regular Gentoo update bumps the version
to gnumeric-1.8.4 and when I tried to download the CSV file, Firefox
complained that the helper app (/usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.3) did not exist.
Well... like... dohhh.  I went through the rigamarole with the file
picker dialogue.  And again, it de-referenced the symlink, this time to
/usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.4

  This annoyed me enough to make me look deeper.  With the help of
Google I found
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__open__&id=176486
I noticed the rant in comment #46, and threw in my own at #47 and went
off on a wild hunch to hack around it.  My hunch appears to work.
Here's a quick-n-dirty work-around to the problem...

  With the help of "grep -r", I found references to to gnumeric-1.8.4 in
file mimeTypes.rdf in my user account directory.  I...

1) shut down Firefox
2) created a backup of mimeTypes.rdf
3) in mimeTypes.rdf manually edited all occurences of
"/usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.4" and "/usr/bin/gnumeric-1.8.3" (why was it
still around?) down to "/usr/bin/gnumeric".
4) restarted Firefox

  The app associated with CSV files is now simply "gnumeric". Nothing
has blown up.  My only complaint now is that I had to hack my way around
the bug.  I won't know for certain until the next update of gnumeric,
but I believe I won't have to re-set the helper app for CSV files.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
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