New `MimeType` fields in .desktop

Thomas Kluyver thomas at kluyver.me.uk
Wed Feb 17 15:53:02 UTC 2021


On Wed, 17 Feb 2021, at 15:06, Bollinger, John C wrote:
> Ok, on re-reading I can see that, but it is even less the GIMP's role to say "you should prefer other applications for opening JPEGs" than it is to say "you should prefer me for opening XCFs".  Desktop files still are not the right place to express policy.

I can see what you're saying, but I don't think it's ridiculous to suggest that a desktop file could encode some indication of how well an application handles a particular file type. You could think of this as describing 'can open' vs 'can import'. A few more examples from my laptop of technically possible matches that you probably wouldn't want to be used by default:
 * Libreoffice Writer & text/plain
 * Libreoffice Draw & application/pdf
 * Pinta (bitmap graphics editor) & image/svg
 * File roller (archive manager) & application/x-chrome-extension
In my experience, things like this haven't really come up, so I'm inclined to agree with you that it doesn't warrant changing the standard. But I think it's better to understand what's specifically going wrong and work out how else it can be improved, rather than insisting that this could never be part of a desktop file. Labelling options with some kind of priority is compromise we live with in various places.

Thomas
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