Re: Important desktop-wide change (MIME)

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Tue, 2004-07-20 at 14:51, Thomas Vander Stichele wrote:
> Woah, I didn't know this was going on.  Nice work.
> 
> Here's a question.  What should happen with applications that use a
> pluggable backend so that, when something gets installed, suddenly they
> can handle more mime types ?
> 
> Is there really no way to make the property of an application that says
> which mime types it handles more dynamic ? Or should we just register
> every single mime type it could ever possibly handle, and then let the
> application fail ?

We need something that makes it easy to update the database, doesn't
need modification of package-manager installed files (many systems don't
support that well at all), and can accurately reflect what MIME types a
given application can handle...

What about providing a method for running an external command to list
MIME types?  i.e., apps that have variable support MIME types (through
plugins, or whatever) could just offer a utility or command line option
to list them out, one per line, and the .desktop file could have an
entry like:

CheckMimeType=/usr/bin/myapp --list-mime

Packagers then just need to call the update-mime-database command after
their plugin is installed.

-- 
Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>
AwesomePlay Productions, Inc.