Shared MIME-Info 0.12

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 03 September 2003 00:22, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > 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?
Yes.

> 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 :)
Then all apps would use 1, and this wouldn't serve any purpose anymore.
The idea with doing it that way was that people would use a 1-10 number for their
apps, so it's always possible to go higher. I haven't seen anyone use a 4 billion
number there yet :)

> > 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.
It does. Imagine you provide a text editor that you know is better than kedit
(the "stupid" plain text editor), but that shouldn't be preferred over the
good default KDE one (kate). You want to use a number between those two.
But if they use 4 and 5 currently -> no luck. You'll use 4 and 5, and the result
will be undefined (not good). Floating point values and negative values also 
help minimizing the number of local .desktop files one needs
to rewrite to change the user's preference. But maybe writing local .desktop
files for this isn't a good idea (leads to problems when uninstalling apps etc.),
which is why KDE on one side, and your spec on the other side, use a 
separate file for this. But even if we don't do that, it's still more flexible
to have such possibilities.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).