New `MimeType` fields in .desktop

[Thomas Kluyver]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2021, at 23:04, Bollinger, John C wrote:
> But that does not imply that some applications should be able to claim to be more equal than others with respect to particular file types.

I think Jehan's idea is that applications should be able to claim to be *less* equal than others for a given mimetype, i.e. that GIMP could declare 'I can open JPEGs, but you should probably use something else by default'. Obviously, if the user explicitly set GIMP as the default handler for image/jpeg, it would override this priority.

Distinguishing things like 'native' and 'equivalent intent' filetypes seems tempting, but I suspect it would end up with a lot of awkward grey areas. If this is a problem worth solving, I'd be more inclined to make a numeric priority scale, something like the shared-mime-info database uses for assigning mimetypes to files (which allows e.g. ODT files to be recognised as ODT rather than general zip files).

Another approach to the stability issue (e.g. GIMP 'taking over' the JPEG mimetype) is for the desktop to fix it: if you open a JPEG file and there isn't already a default application for that, store whatever it uses as the default application, so it won't change unless the user manually changes the association or uninstalls that application. I think that could be done without changing any specs.

Thomas
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