New `MimeType` fields in .desktop

[Jehan Pagès]

Hi!

On Thu, Feb 18, 2021 at 12:51 PM Simon McVittie <smcv at collabora.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 18 Feb 2021 at 00:36:22 -0700, Thayne wrote:
> > I'd like to point out that on Ubuntu 20.04 there are no system
> > mimeapps.list files provided (either for DE or globally).
>
> It seems like an Ubuntu bug report would be appropriate, if that's true.
> Debian has at least these:
>
> cinnamon-desktop-data: /usr/share/applications/x-cinnamon-mimeapps.list
> gnome-session-common: /usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list
>
> and I'd be surprised if Ubuntu has taken steps to remove the one shipped
> by Debian when deriving their gnome-session package from Debian's...
>
> > It also puts the burden of
> > maintaining that list on package maintainers rather than distributing
> > it among applications developers.
>
> A distribution's *entire job* is integration: taking software produced by
> lots of disparate application developers (each developer presumably
> thinking the application they maintain is the best, otherwise they wouldn't
> still be maintaining it) and putting it together into something that works
> as an overall system. This is necessarily going to involve some opinionated
> decisions, both in what the distribution installs by default and in what
> the distribution lists as preferred.
>

Very true. The proposed change does not remove the power of opinion and
choice of what distribution installs by default or select as "prefered". It
will only help when the distribution did not have an opinion or did not
think of selecting anything explicitly.

This is currently the very gray area where some algorithm ends up selecting
completely randomly/arbitrary any software which supports even remotely a
format. Sometimes we are lucky, got a reasonable association so we didn't
pay attention, but sometimes not (and that's when someone, out of
exasperation if it happened several times, may end up reporting it as an
issue).
With the proposed change, we could still have to choose arbitrarily within
several software, but at least a smaller and much more relevant list of
software.

Jehan


>     smcv
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