implementation of per-environment MIME defaults

[Stanislav Brabec]

David Faure wrote:

> I don't understand this; we don't use defaults.list in KDE, and it's not part 
> of any spec, is it?

KDE does not use defaults.list nowadays, and GNOME does not support
InitialPreference any more. Hopefully - it made impossible to use
correct defaults for both KDE and GNOME installed on a single machine.

Current implementations of defaults.list and InitialPreference support
only a single environment, so only one environment can support it.


The new proposal has two main purposes:

- Make possible to use environment specific defaults:
  - If GLib/GTK+/GNOME applications are running in KDE environment, they
    should use KDE default applications.
  - Different GTK+ based environments (GNOME, XFCE, GPE) can use
    different defaults while running on the same machine.

- Use smart way to maintain MIME defaults (manual maintenance of distro
  wide defaults.list caused several bug reports).

Making possible KDE migration to defaults.list is just a side effect.


defaults.list is not yet in any spec. This is currently a GLib-specific
feature using file format very similar to mimeinfo.cache (which is
already part of desktop-file-utils).

Small GLib behavior change (read {environment}-defaults.list first)
would make possible to use defaults.list in an environments specific
way.

Implementing the defaults heuristics inside update-desktop-database
looks very natural to me: This utility already reads all desktop files
and makes operations on them.

-- 
Best Regards / S pozdravem,

Stanislav Brabec
software developer
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