shared mime-data

[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 20:41, Waldo Bastian wrote:
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> On Mon December 01 2003 20:52, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > Is that a worthy TODO item, or do people think that it would be
> > something that could be achieved with inheritance?
> >
> > Cheers
> 
> In KDE (3.2) we use inheritance for that. We would create an image/pjpeg type 
> that says "I'm also image/jpeg" and then when you feed  image/pjpeg in the 
> trader, it will automatically come up with applications that can open 
> image/jpeg.
> 
> Syntactically it might be nicer to do it the other way around and let 
> "image/jpeg" says "I'm also known as image/pjpeg", you wouldn't need to 
> duplicate the description (+translations) of image/jpeg for image/pjpeg then.

That's pretty much how we do it currently, except we also copy the
handler information. If the handler information is split out, having
aliases would make it much easier indeed.
As the database grows, it would only make work harder for ourselves to
add more aliases, and sort out the "broken" mime-types from the proper
ones.

As far as implementation goes, we could simply have:
- an additional element in the source XML file, like:
<alias value="image/pjpeg"/>
- and have update-mime-database either create (or link) a
<MIME>/image/pjpeg.xml, the real mime-type would be in the type
attribute. (Other people will be able to formulate better ideas as far
as speed is concerned).

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net> 
Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the
bin without reading them.