Shared MIME-Info 0.12

[Christophe Fergeau]

> Christophe: could you update http://cfergeau.free.fr/mime-spec.txt so that
> we can restart the discussion from the latest version? (even the last version
> posted here doesn't seem to be the most uptodate). Thanks.

The latest version was already online, but I added versioning to the
file name so it's at http://cfergeau.free.fr/mime-spec-0.2.txt
That's the most up to date file I have, some of the comments on this
list may not have been taken into account yet, I'm planning to rework on
it soon.


> > FIXME: how to store app-specific info in the database? (to allow app writers to 
> > associate app-specific info to mime types) 
> They shouldn't need to. All they need to do is to be able to provide "initial priorities",
> that the users can change afterwards in the local mime-type storage (or in another
> file, wouldn't that be cleaner? (*)).

The kind of stuff I was thinking to is a web browser wanting to remember
that "file with this mime type should always be saved to disk, or opened
without asking", but on second thought, that can be stored in separate
file since there is nothing shareable there.

> 
> I happened to discuss this with Waldo today, and we came up with the following
> syntax, for how to specify initial preferences in applications .desktop files.
> 
> Instead of the current
> MimeType=text/plain;text/x-tex;text/html
> (and the global InitialPreference number that KDE had), the application .desktop file 
> will be able to specify
> MimeType=text/plain;8;text/x-tex;2;text/html;1
> This respects the notion of a semicolon-separated list, but introduces numbers
> between each mimetype (older code will most probably skip it, as an unknown mimetype).
> 

That could be more readable, but if that helps on the kde side, why
not...

> Those numbers are relative, to all the handlers of a given mimetype. 
> E.g. lyx would have 7 for text/x-tex and would therefore be preferred over x-tex.

You mean that the preferred app would be the app with the higher number?
For stuff related to priority, I generally use the item with the lowest
priority as the more appropriate, but I don't feel really strongly about
that :)

> 
> The default value would be 1 (for compatibility reasons with KDE's current behavior),
> and we could accept negative and floating-point values (to be able to insert between two existing apps).

Negative and floating-point values is too hackish imo. I think we should
define ranges (something like "1-10 is used so that the user can always
override the preferred app for a mime type, 11-20 should be used for
apps which are perfectly appropriate to open this mime type, ..."), even
if two apps have the same number, this shouldn't hurt.


Christophe
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