Sub-class of text/plain

[Bastien Nocera]

Heya,

I was wondering why GEdit opened up .rtf files on my system (instead of
say Abiword, or, heck, OpenOffice). GEdit registers itself as supporting
text/plain thus being the application that would support all the
text/plain and subclasses of text/plain mime-types.

The problem is that a number of mime-types that are only relatively
related to text/plain (ie. that are not binary) are listed as subclasses
of the aforementioned mime-types.

- application/rtf
Lowest common denominator word processor format, useless as text
- application/smil, application/x-xbel, 
Really a descendant of text/xml
- application/x-awk and a whole slew of others
Scripting languages, makes sense to edit those with a text editor
- application/x-desktop
A desktop file

Should we modify gnome-vfs to have an application that advertises the
proper mime-type rather than one of its parent as the default? (ie. if
Abiword explicitely mentioned text/rtf, it would be the default, rather
than GEdit that only supports the parent)
Or should we remove from shared-mime-info the subclassing for those
types that it doesn't make sense to edit as a file? (which would bring
it inline with a number of other formats that are plain text, but make
no sense to edit in a text editor, like playlist formats)

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess at hadess.net>