New `MimeType` fields in .desktop

shirish शिरीष shirishag75 at gmail.com
Sat Sep 4 14:47:37 UTC 2021


<snipped>

Dear all,

I snipped the above as it just confuses rather than makes life easy.

There are two use-cases, a newcomer who comes to one of the
distributions and desktops and wants to use it. S/he has no idea which
applications are good with x or y because for her/him the applications
themselves are unknown. So today, s/he could have gimp for pdf where
probably evince or atril or qpdview would be better, but that means
that person should have that knowledge which s/he won't and there is
nothing within the system which tells her/him what to pick and choose.
And I'm not even going into the different desktops because that's
another 'fun' topic altogether :)

There is another part as well, most file formats have a version number
and many a time some applications are able to get more than others.

To take the same example, pdf 2.0 is the latest version from upstream -

https://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/version

But most tools in Debian are good for till 1.4 at least till 2017,
when I last checked - 1/-

1/- https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/360860/what-is-the-highest-format-version-of-pdf-that-free-software-can-produce

So if a new user bought a pdf 2.0 s/he will think the system is trash
because none of the software can read it. I do hope that the situation
has improved since then but that means both upstream work as well as
downstream work (packaging).

Let's say there are a couple of packages from around 10-15 packages
which can read pdf 2.0 or even create, how do we let the user know
about it. Today s/he has just no clue.

-- 
          Regards,
          Shirish Agarwal  शिरीष अग्रवाल
  My quotes in this email licensed under CC 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
http://flossexperiences.wordpress.com

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