mime-type/application association spec

[Christophe Fergeau]

> Why is there a 2 way set of links? ie:
> 
> .desktop file <-> mime hierarchy
> 
> Why not just have .desktop files stating which mime types they can
> handle then an optional set of overrides, for instance for when you want
> to "unassociate" a program from a mime type.

Mainly because in the beginning, I modelled this after what GNOME is
doing currently, and because in the beginning, I hadn't yet decided to
make .desktop files mandatory to associate an app with a mime-type.

>         
> Not sure this is a good idea. Filing systems tend to be highly optimised
> for storage and quick retrieval of files. Putting "file systems within a
> file" is sort of dubious from that aspect.....

seek time on hard disks is slow, a big file will be faster to load than
100 small files if an app needs to load the whole database at once. This
will suck badly for apps who does not want to load the whole database at
once though.

> Are we sure we want to do this? There are quite a few old or broken apps
> (think - realplayer) which simply don't use the modern .desktop
> standard. Being able to associate files with them manually would be
> good. Perhaps a part of the mime-type hierarchy file.
> 

In my mind, these cases are to be handled by creating a dummy .desktop
file. This can lead to many superfluous .desktop files, which partly
explains why I think it would be better to support the concatenation of
multiple .desktop files.

Christophe
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