Shared MIME-Info 0.12

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Sep 03, 2003 at 04:47:06PM +0100, Geoff Youngs wrote:
[...]
> Why create "non-existant" entries?  Wouldn't it be easier to use
> something like the following?
> 
> 	<mime-type type='audio/midi'>
> 		<alias type='audio/x-midi'/>
> 		... rest of midi info ....
> 	</mime-type>
> 
> And then have an aliases file along the lines of the globs file which
> can be used to map recognised types to used types?

That's another way of doing it. I don't have any preference. Which would
people prefer?

The main advantage to having extra types is that aliasing becomes a
special case of subclassing, whereas with an aliases file it's something
completely different. But the aliases file would be quicker and smaller.

> Would it be possible to add a paragraph to the spec along the lines of:
> 
> 	Whether a mime-type exists within the shared-mime-database may be
> 	determined by the presence of a $XDG_DATA_DIRS/mime/<type>.xml 
> 	file.
> 
> This is my understanding of the current behaviour, but I don't think
> that it's explicitly mentioned and would be of use for applications
> trying to work out whether they need to install a package to define a
> particular type or whether it the user has it defined anyway.

Applications should install their package file anyway. Even if the user
already has a definition for application/foo, they may not have a French
translation, the *.foo pattern, or the information that your application
is capable of handling files of that type. Check the 'packages'
subdirectory to see if your package is already installed.

> If it's not already done, would it also be possible to wipe all the
> generated xml files whenever update-mime-database is run

Doesn't that happen anyway?


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6  8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1