Have a way to dynamically change software associations at distribution level

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 13:40 +0200, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> On Tue, 4 Aug 2009 11:02:43 +0200
> David Faure <faure at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tuesday 04 August 2009, Didier Roche wrote:
> > > Hello everyone,
> > > 
> > > Right now, GNU/Linux distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, from what I see
> > > it seems to apply to Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandrake as well…) use a
> > > static defaults.list file in $XDG_DATA_DIRS/applications shipped by
> > > the distribution for associating a mimetype to a default
> > > application.
> > 
> > defaults.list is a gnome-only file, it is not part of a freedesktop
> > standard and not read by KDE.
> 
> It doesn't seem to be written by GIO anymore. It still reads
> defaults.list for backwards compatibility reasons but I think it only
> writes to mimeapps.list.
> 

defaults.list is not meant to be written by session agents. It is is the
system-wide defaults. mimeapps.list is the per-user file that overrides
it. All this has been worked out on this list between Alex Larsson and
David Faure some time ago.