Proposal for a MIME mapping spec

[Jonathan Blandford]

Thomas Leonard <tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> writes:

> > The defaults are first read in
> > $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications/defaults.list.  It is expected that these
> > defaults are set solely by the distributor of the system.  Then, a
> > $MIME_PREFS_LIST environment variable is checked for other preferred
> > applications.  This is expected to be set by a sysadmin providing their
> > own defaults.  Additionally, each desktop should prepend its own
> > defaults to this variable.
> 
> Why is this config information in $XDG_DATA_DIRS? Surely it should be in
> $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS? MIME_PREFS_LIST seems unnecessary, since desktops can
> already add to XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (ROX-Session adds
> /uri/0install/rox.sourceforge.net/lib/DefaultChoices to the choices search
> path, for example).

I would expect there to be a one-to-one mapping between the desktop
directories and the defaults.list, and thus it's XDG_DATA_DIRS.
MIME_PREFS_LIST might be unnecessary -- I'm not fully sold on it yet.
If we think that adding to XDG_DATA_DIRS is sufficient for this, then we
can just use that.

> > Then, $XDG_DATA_CONFIG/mime/defaults.list is checked for user-specific
> > defaults.  Finally, it is expected that each desktop will have their own
> > (optional) user-specific desktop file.
> 
> XDG_DATA_CONFIG? Do you mean XDG_DATA_DIRS or XDG_CONFIG_DIRS?

Grr.. XDG_CONFIG_DIRS.  I get these environment variables confused.

-Jonathan