[gedit-list] user specific language specs

[Ernesto Posse <eposse gmail com>]

Hi. I have an issue with the installation of syntax highlighting for a
custom language spec. I need to be able to install support for the
custom language on a per-user basis, not system-wide. According to
http://live.gnome.org/Gedit/NewLanguage, a user specific .lang file
should be placed in ~/.local/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs
and the corresponding mime type .xml should go in
~/.local/share/mime/packages. However this does not seem to work, and
the new language goes unrecognized by gedit. On the other hand, if I
use the system-wide directories
(/usr/share/gtksourceview-2.0/language-specs and
/usr/share/mime/packages), it works and I get syntax highlighting, but
my requirements are that this can only be installed on user-specific
directories. Furthermore, if I use the system-wide directory for
language specs, but the user-specific directory for the mime-type, I
get the following message when running update-mime-database
.local/share/mime:

Note that '/home/eposse/.local/share' is not in the search path
set by the XDG_DATA_HOME and XDG_DATA_DIRS
environment variables, so applications may not
be able to find it until you set them. The
directories currently searched are:


- /root/.local/share
- /usr/local/share/
- /usr/share/

I get this message even if I explicitly do: export
XDG_DATA_HOME=$HOME/.local/share.

So, my questions are:

1) Why doesn't gedit/gtksourceview recognize the user-specific
language-specs directory, as the documentation says? or do I need to
do something else?
2) Why do I get that message from update-mime-database?

Thanks

PS: I'm running gedit 2.28.0 on ubuntu 9.10



-- 
Ernesto Posse

Applied Formal Methods Group - Software Technology Lab
School of Computing
Queen's University - Kingston, Ontario, Canada