Re: Mime Type Analysis

[David Faure <david mandrakesoft com>]

On Thursday 30 November 2000 20:32, Elliot Lee wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, Kurt Granroth wrote:
> 
> > So (HUGE personal opinion, here), I think the best bet would be for
> > the GNOME project to follow the agreed upon DES.  Now is a great time,
> > too, since the VFS layer still hasn't been released.  There is already
> > ample code in GNOME for handling .desktop files so that shouldn't be a
> > problem either.
> 
> Putting MIME type handling in .desktop files is broken - there's not a 1:1
> or even a 1:many relation between applications and MIME types.

You didn't understand the way it works. The desktop file that has Type=MimeType
describes a mimetype (similar to one entry in a .mime and .keys file, united into
one desktop file for this mimetype). It does nothing else, it doesn't talk about
applications at all.

It's the desktop file of the application (Type=Application, or Type=Service
for more abstract services) that lists the mimetype handled by the application,
just like you do too.

Those are TWO different kind of desktop files, as described by the Type entry
(and the location of the file), not to be mixed one with the other.

> The GNOME system has stupidities too, but it does have the advantage of
> laying out the files in a format that more closely matches the ways the
> data will need to be programmatically stored/accessed.

I think the huge advantage of desktop files is that applications can easily
provide their own mimetype (for instance kword installs an application/x-kword
mimetype by itself).

Just like you don't have one single list of applications in a text file, so that
it's easy to add a new application to the system.

Accessing desktop files programmatically is no problem, it's already what
we all do for applications.

-- 
David FAURE, david mandrakesoft com, faure kde org
http://www.mandrakesoft.com/~david/, http://www.konqueror.org/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today
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