Associating mime types with icons - broken?

[Waldo Bastian]

On Monday 21 March 2005 20:18, Mike Hearn wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've spent the last few hours trying to figure out how you can add an icon
> for a MIME type for some 3rd party software. Unfortunately there are a few
> problems:
>
> - Firstly the icon theme spec is extremely vague about this, it doesn't
>   mention mime types explicitly anywhere, nor does it mention how
>   a mimetype like application/x-foo is translated to an icon theme name
>
> - Secondly GNOME apparently refuses to use any icon that doesn't start
>   with gnome-mime- so that is what I have to call my icon. I haven't
>   tested this in KDE.

KDE doesn't use the shared-mime-spec yet. Currently it has a Icon= line in its 
mimetype definition files that specify which icon to use for that mimetype.

> - Thirdly adding a new icon seems to require doing a "killall nautilus"
>   to have it detected. I tried touching /usr/share/icons which is what I
>   guessed the spec meant by "top level directory" but no cigar.
>
> Can anybody help me? The spec certainly needs clarifying on the matter,
> but before I can write a patch I need to know what the intended behaviour
> is!

That part hasn't materialized up to now. At the bottom of 
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Standards_2fshared_2dmime_2dinfo_2dspec it is 
suggested to map a "major/minor" mimetype to an icon named "mime-major:minor" 
but that is a bad idea because ":" is not supported in filenames on all 
filesystems.

The icon theme specification uses "mime_major_minor.png" in its examples, I 
think that will work.

Cheers,
Waldo
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