mime apps specification

[Luc Menut]

Le 02/04/2014 17:06, David Faure a écrit :
> After so many years, he's finally a proposal for a unified mechanism for
> selecting the default application for a given mimetype.
>
> The mechanism is unified, but note that it supports different defaults for
> different desktop environments, if so desired.
>
> This is the result of a discussion with Ryan Lortie, Alex Larsson and myself,
> I'm sending it here for further comments before pushing it to the git repo.
>
>

Great work. Many thanks, it's really nice to see improvements and 
standardization on this.

I have some questions about this specification proposal.

The previous freedesktop specification was
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mime-actions-spec
I guess it will be deprecated by the current proposal.

What about KDE's InitialPreference and Gnome's defaults.list?
IIUC, I guess that they are deprecated too, and will be respectively 
replaced by kde-mimeapps.list and gnome-mimeapps.list.
But at which level? "application vendors" (= $XDG_DATA_HOME/applications)?

The proposed lookup order = preferences order is
users > sys-admin > vendors > distribution

If desktop environments install their default preferences 
($xdc-mimeapps.list) at vendors level, desktop environments preferences 
will override distribution preferences (when they overlap).

Then, if a distribution wants to modify a desktop environment preference 
for a mimetype, the only way seems to patch the desktop environment 
$xdc-mimeapps.list? or have I missed something?


regards,
Luc

-- 
Luc Menut
Mageia Contributor