The status of Freedesktop.org MIME support?

[Hongli Lai <h lai chello nl>]

What's the current status of freedesktop.org MIME support in gnome-vfs? 
I installed GNOME 2.6 and sadly I discovered several things:
- gnome-vfs doesn't seem to use ~/.local/share/mime unless 
$XDG_DATA_DIRS is set.
- If I run update-mime-database ~/.local/share/mime, gnome-vfs doesn't 
detect changes until I restart the entire application (Nautilus)!

And the most important of all:
- The MIME sniffing stuff doesn't seem to be implemented at all. I have 
a file with the extension .package. It contains a stub shell script 
header and a tgz payload. In GNOME <= 2.4, Nautilus keeps detecting the 
file as a shell script, and there's no way to override it. I had hoped 
that I can now finally override this, but gnome-vfs doesn't seem to 
support FD.o's MIME sniffing at all.

What's the status of the FD.o MIME implementation in gnome-vfs? Are the 
problems I mentioned already known and will they be fixed in the future?