Shared MIME-Info 0.12

[David Faure]

On Friday 29 August 2003 17:58, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Along these lines, what's the thinking here about working toward
> adopting Christophe Fergeau's proposed 'action' spec. 

Christophe: could you update http://cfergeau.free.fr/mime-spec.txt so that
we can restart the discussion from the latest version? (even the last version
posted here doesn't seem to be the most uptodate). Thanks.

> FIXME: how to store app-specific info in the database? (to allow app writers to 
> associate app-specific info to mime types) 
They shouldn't need to. All they need to do is to be able to provide "initial priorities",
that the users can change afterwards in the local mime-type storage (or in another
file, wouldn't that be cleaner? (*)).

I happened to discuss this with Waldo today, and we came up with the following
syntax, for how to specify initial preferences in applications .desktop files.

Instead of the current
MimeType=text/plain;text/x-tex;text/html
(and the global InitialPreference number that KDE had), the application .desktop file 
will be able to specify
MimeType=text/plain;8;text/x-tex;2;text/html;1
This respects the notion of a semicolon-separated list, but introduces numbers
between each mimetype (older code will most probably skip it, as an unknown mimetype).

Those numbers are relative, to all the handlers of a given mimetype. 
E.g. lyx would have 7 for text/x-tex and would therefore be preferred over x-tex.

The default value would be 1 (for compatibility reasons with KDE's current behavior),
and we could accept negative and floating-point values (to be able to insert between two existing apps).

How does that sound?

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).