handling optional MimeTypes in a Desktop Entry

[Bastien Nocera]

On Wed, 2014-04-30 at 05:23 -0400, Ryan Lortie wrote:
> hi,
> 
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014, at 13:50, François Cami wrote:
> > I've read the Desktop Entry Specification at
> > http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/index.html
> > and haven't found an answer to my problem, so here goes:
> 
> I'm not sure any of these options will really work.
> 
> In the simple case of applications with plugins one of these options
> might be acceptable, but consider the case that we have something like
> Totem using GStreamer.  When I install a GStreamer plugin, how should it
> know about Totem existing in order to update its list?
> 
> The only thing I can think of is that we have some mime type to mean
> "all of the types of things supported by GStreamer" (where GStreamer
> could also be the name of an individual application, in the case of
> direct plugins).  It might make sense to also say "all of the _audio_
> file types supported by GStreamer" as well.
> 
> I'm not really sure what this would look like, and I'm also not sure if
> I would be in favour of the final result.  This is a tough problem and
> I'm not sure that any solution is palatable.

For the GStreamer case, I should add that:
- GStreamer doesn't really "support" mime-types. At best, you would know
that you have a plugin to handle the container type (AVI, MPEG-4, MKV).
- Using GStreamer's automatic codec installers requires _all_ the
possibly supported types to be listed in the desktop file.

Cheers