Proposal for a MIME mapping spec

[Mike Hearn]

On Wed, 2004-07-07 at 23:49 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> I can think of a number of users... the developers (like me) that will
> install the stuff from source. Will we need to add magic lines to our
> Makefiles that we will need to disable when a package is being created?
> (see GConf). Or could we rely on the computer actually making our jobs
> easier?

Well, the thing is that the "drop a file and run update-foo" pattern is
pretty common, mostly because it fits in well with autotools and package
managers, whilst still being fairly efficient.

If we have a process that does nothing but sit around watching
directories that may never change and regenerate the cache, then we end
up with lots of such processes. It seems the problem is that we're
overloading the meaning of "make install". It's supposed to set up the
system for using the software AND generate buildroots, whereas they're
really different things. Maybe autotools should provide a "make
buildroot" target as well?

One thing - running the proposed update program from make install inside
RPM should do nothing, right? The .desktop file will be inside the build
root where the program can't find it. 

The other thing is you might get into races where say 4 .desktop files
are installed but slowly, the watcher process starts rebuilding the
cache after it spots the first 2 new files but before the last 2. Then
it has to do it all over again.

I've not written such programs though, so I'm probably wrong about
this. 

thanks -mike