Re: double-click on scripts behaviour

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 11:54, Shahms King wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-04-29 at 04:38, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Because of the switch to shared mime info, when the user double clicks
> > on an executable shell (or python, or perl) script, the dialog asking
> > whether the user wants to edit it, or run it is no longer displayed.
> > This happens because nautilus displays this dialog when it encounters a
> > text/xxx executable file, but in the shared mime database, most scripts
> > have an application/xxx mime type.
> > The attached patch special cases the various scripts mime types I could
> > find so that the dialog properly appears, but I'm not sure hard coding
> > these mime types in nautilus is the best way to do that. Maybe the
> > various scripts should be moved from application/xxx to test/xxx in the
> > shared mime database (incidentally, there's already a text/x-ksh for ksh
> > scripts, this should be made consistent with the other scripts mime
> > types somehow).
> > 
> > Thoughts?
> > 
> > Christophe
> 
> This highlights one of my major problems with the current MIME database
> (something that I'll get around to discussing on that list one of these
> days): many documents can/should have multiple MIME types.  These MIME
> types are frequently hierarchical in nature, e.g. an SVG image has the
> registered "most specific" MIME type of image/svg+xml, however
> application/xml and arguably text/xml both also apply.  RFC 3023
> addresses this specific issue by using the magic '+xml' suffix and
> declares that XML is the first 'generic format' that requires this
> special treatment.  That is absolutely incorrect.  I can think of one
> other format that is used in a similar fashion: zip.  At the moment Java
> archives ('.jar') and OpenOffice.org documents ('.sxi', etc.) are both
> zip files with a prescribed structure.  Should their MIME types be
> application/x-oowriter+zip? More (potentially) controversial are
> applications like AbiWord that support gzipped file formats (.abw or
> .abwz files).  Is one file format application/x-abiword+xml and the
> other application/x-abiword+gz? AbiWord is capable of opening both, but
> it isn't capable of opening a generic gzip.
> 
> Currently, the 'sniffed' MIME type is the definitive one and is also
> likely to be the incorrect one.  Sniffing a .abwz file tells us it's a
> gzip, just like a .tar.gz, however AbiWord cannot open tarballs and File
> Roller has no idea what to do with an AbiWord document (well, it can
> decompress it, but that's not likely what you wanted to do with it).

That is not true. We special case these cases.

> My first reaction to your post was to say that the use of 'application/'
> was misplaced, however, doing a little research seems to indicate that
> it is indeed correct, but at the same time, very broken.  All of a
> sudden the text editor I've registered to handle text/* must be
> associated with every single programming language I use because the
> scripts are considered 'applications' rather than 'text'.  That's absurd
> and yet, apparently, correct.

Our current mime system doesn't allow you to register for text/*, so the
point about application vs text is moot anyway. However, we should
support some sort of mime aliasing to make it possible to register for
e.g. all text files.