GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 71094
gnome-mime-data should use the freedesktop MIME standard
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
I recently upgraded to the newest version of gnome-mime-data. Gnome-mime-data includes some mime type databases which seem redundant. /etc/gnome-vfs-mime-magic should be integrated with file's magic database (/usr/share/magic on my system). /usr/share/mime-info/gnome-vfs.mime should be integrated with /etc/mime.types. /etc/mailcap should also be used by GNOME. etc. If gnome-mime-data was integrated with the more traditional databases such as /etc/mime.types and /usr/share/magic, non-GNOME applications, such as file and mutt, could take advantage of GNOME database updates.
They're welcome to use GnomeVFS to get this information. Basically the file formats do not contain the same information as GnomeVFS (note that we use mime types), and moreover the location, and even the format, of these files varies from system to system.
Perhaps FHS or LSB should add mention of MIME related databases. This work should really be shared with KDE, command line tools, etc. It seems silly to maintain separate databases for GNOME and command line tools. Perhaps the database file formats for GnomeVFS could be re-thought so that new non-compatible information is stored in seperate files.
Eventually we plan to use .desktop files for MIME data, which will be compatible with KDE. This will be even less compatible with file, of course, but compatibility with KDE is much more important.
The folks at freedesktop.org have been discussing this issue. After some discussion on the XDG mailing list, https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list, a draft MIME-info database standard was published. The subject of the mail thread was "Central MIME info database." The standard is available at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tal00r/info.html. Please take a look -- it is a start.
Retitling bug.
A lot of progress seems to be made on this. Recent gnome-vfs packages seem to use freedesktop.org's /usr/share/mime/magic. However, gnome-mime-data still seems to provide gnome-vfs-mime-magic. This seems redundant. What is gnome-vfs-mime-magic still around for? Also, the contents of /usr/share/application-registry/ and /usr/share/applications seem quite redundant. /usr/share/applications is from the freedesktop.org's desktop entry specification. Is GNOME in the middle of transitioning from one of these systems to the other? The only non-redundant information I see is the the former provides support for "can_open_multiple_files" and "supported_uri_schemes" but the freedesktop.org's specification does not. Finally, gnome-vfs still seems to get its filename extension->mime type mapping from /usr/share/mime-info/*.mime. Are there any plans to transition to using freedesktop.org's /usr/share/mime/globs?
This is ancient. gnome-mime-data is gnome-mime-data, the whole mime system needs to be changed in gnome-vfs, and the xdg-mime stuff, not in gnome-mime-data. If you really care about using the xdg-mime stuff, file a bug against gnome-vfs, gnome-mime-data is only some data files...