GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 170699
Icons should have the ability to cover an entire mime-type/filetype
Last modified: 2008-09-06 18:54:38 UTC
It would be nice if instead of having to have icons for every filetype such as application-video-avi, application-video-mpeg, etc., if instead you could have one icon for application-video and have it be applied to all of those filetypes. I initially filed this under gnome-mime-data, but then was informed this is more of a gnome-vfs issue.
Thanks for your bug report! Nowadays we use shared-mime-info [1] as our source of MIME information Shouldn't this work now that xdgmime has MIME subclassing in place? Two issues: 1) There should be a global parent class which subclasses all video MIME types(application/x-video or such). I don't think there yet exists such a parent class. This is shared-mime-info's job. 2) GNOME-VFS should support having an icon for a whole "MIME group". In this case, "video", since many movie MIME types are "video/x-sgi-movie", "video/foo". Is this already possible? [1] http://freedesktop.org/Software/shared-mime-info
FYI, I've filed 1) under freedesktop.org bugzilla [1]. [1] https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3250
Well, it _is_ impemented in a way. In an .theme file for the icons, if you remove the "inherits" line, Gnome will use the very high-level icons that would cover an entire MIME type if none of the specific ones (i.e .mp3, .ogg, .wma, etc) exist. What I am seeing happens you have specified an upper level MIME type, but you don't have one for all the MIME types. For example, I may have an icon that covers the "audio" MIME types, but I don't have one that would cover .pdf, .zip, .tar, etc. These don't fit into one of the MIME classes perse, but instead they are something like "gnome-application-x-pdf", etc. So to correct this, you would use the "inherits" in your .theme file for the icon set. When Gnome encounters an audio file, mp3 for instance, it sees that there is a specific mp3 icon in the inherited icon set and uses this instead of the icon that was already specified to cover _all_ the audio MIME types. What would be nice is if Gnome could first check the icon theme. It would then apply the appropriate icons, and then it would start looking in the inherited icon set for any MIME types whose higher level MIME icon has not been assigned yet. Here would be an example of the order it could go: See .mp3 file look in current icon set for .mp3 icon if none are found, look for the audio class MIME icon if that exists, then it is done, else, look in the inherited icon set for an .mp3 icon if the .mp3 icon in the inherited set exists, then apply it else, look in the inherited set for the audio class icon if is found, apply it else, use the "unknown" icon" end if end if end if end if
Hi all Well this seems to be the best place on the whole internet to ask my problem at the moment... so here goes... let me know if you'd prefer I filed a new bug/rfe. I have been trying to package up an application which defines its own documents filetype, *.mso. These documents are easily editable as text, so it makes sense do define their mime type as text/x-mso. I want to be able to define an icon for these documents. I've managed to install the icon in the location /usr/share/icons/gnome/48x48/mimetypes/gnome-mime-text-x-mso.png and also /usr/share/pixmaps/emso.png but instead of my lovely icons being displayed, the default GNOME 'text' icon shows up, which has a plain 'page' look but includes a thumbnail of the first few characters of the first few lines. Looking at Brian's comments above, it seems that this is deliberate: *fallback* icons will always be used if present in the current 'icon set' (I take that to mean for example 'hicolor' or Bluecurve). Is there a way that I can specify this icon without adding copies of my icon to all of the installed 'icon sets'? Or should I just relax and accept that the 'fallback' icon is what the user actually *wants* ? Cheers, JP
John: You should install it in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/mimetypes/text/x-mso.png. Before your files show up as "text/x-mso", you'll have to specify the MIME type according to the freedesktop.org MIME spec, installing a file like <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <mime-info xmlns="http://www.freedesktop.org/Standards/shared-mime-info"> <mime-type type="text/x-mso"> <sub-class-of type="text/plain"/> <comment>MSO document</comment> <glob pattern="*.mso"/> <magic priority="50"> <!-- specify typical contents of the file accoding to the spec !--> </magic> </mime-type> </mime-info> to /usr/share/mime/packages/mso.xml, running update-mime-database after installation. Sorry for the late response!
Please do not install MIME type icons into the theme with standard names. We are working on a solution for applications needing to provide MIME icons, in the icon and mime specifications on freedesktop.org, but the implementation isn't available yet.
gnome-vfs has been deprecated and superseded by gio/gvfs since GNOME 2.22, hence mass-closing many of the gnome-vfs requests/bug reports. This means that gnome-vfs is NOT actively maintained anymore, however patches are still welcome. If your reported issue is still valid for gio/gvfs, please feel free to file a bug report against glib/gio or gvfs. @Bugzilla mail recipients: query for gnome-vfs-mass-close to get rid of this notification noise all together. General further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GVFS Reasons behind this decision are listed at http://www.mail-archive.com/gnome-vfs-list@gnome.org/msg00899.html