Comment 4 for bug 513133

I suspect that Google is trying to cover all its bases (why it checks all the gconf keys *and* the xdg-mime value) so that no matter what goofy launch mechanism is used, chromium will come up. So they would likely accept a patch that checked/set alternatives as well as others if on a Debian system.

As for whether the Debian packaging would disable the other checks... I'm not sure. There is some value setting all those fields, since the world of 'what to launch' is complicated and many apps check different things.

One complication I'm noticing here is that when chromium actually does the check, it calls "which" and "readlink -f" on the command in its desktop file. This causes two bugs: You need to set the full path in the gconf fields, which is not normal or the default, and further, that it finds the 'chromium-browser' in /usr/lib/chromium-browser first (because PATH is prefixed with that dir by the /usr/bin wrapper) and thus the gconf values must actually match /usr/lib/chromium-browser/chromium-browser.

We should probably patch xdg-settings to at least not call which/readlink.