Fwd: Printable "Shared MIME-info Database" document

[Thomas Leonard]

[ forwarding to xdg-list as I'm no longer the maintainer of the
shared-mime stuff ]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh at pacbell.net>
Date: 8 May 2010 19:31
Subject: Re: Printable "Shared MIME-info Database" document


On Sat, 2010-05-08 at 15:15 +0100, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On 5 May 2010 23:50, Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > I'm starting to study your very interesting document Shared MIME-info
> > Database, (URL:
> > http://standards.freedesktop.org/shared-mime-info-spec/shared-mime-info-spec-latest.html)
> > and would like to get a good looking printed copy.  I assume the html was
> > generated from some sort of document "source", like Docbook or OpenOffice
> > .odt, which could be used to produce such a printout.  Is this source on the
> > X Desktop Group site?  If so where?  If not, is it elsewhere, or can you
> > email me a copy?
>
> http://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/tree/shared-mime-info-spec.xml

Thanks much; this is what I was looking for.  A few comments:

     * There used to be a nice tradition in Linux reference documents
       that a printable file would contain a pointer its "source", if
       such a thing existed.  It would be nice if this spec contained
       one.
     * It wasn't clear to me how to create printable output from the
       xml source, till I tried to simply fed it to Open Office, which
       worked fine.
     * The README to the source packages for the utilities (I
       downloaded Release-0-71.tar.gz) is not quite correct.  It
       instructs the user to invoke ./configure, while it should
       instruct him to invoke autogen.sh
     * The man page is not clear to a naive user (such as myself).  The
       key section reads:
       ARGUMENTS
              MIME-DIR
                     This is the directory for which
update-mime-database should rebuild
                     the cache. Mandatory if none of the options is provided.

       It's not clear what level of the directory tree ought to be
       provided.  Maybe you should change the first sentence to read
       something like "This is the directory for which
       update-mime-database should rebuild the cache.  It usually has
       the form .../mime/ , and contains the directories packages and
       applications."

       The spec cleared all this up.

Thanks for a very useful system - jon