shared-mime-info and desktops

[Bastien Nocera]

----- Original Message -----
> Greetings.
> 
> For a while now it's been possible for desktops to have their own mime
> info (which is great), but it seems we have also gotten rid of the
> generic one, which causes some strange behavior:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1243049
> 
> ie, /usr/share/applications/defaults.list no longer exists, and
> shared-mime-info ships just a:
> /usr/share/applications/gnome.list

Nearly, it ships /usr/share/applications/gnome-mimeapps.list

> This leads to issues with tools that don't happen to be run under
> gnome.

The only "problem" is that the handler for each mime-type will be semi-random
based on the installed packages.

> Of course other desktops can (and probibly should) make their
> own lists, but IMHO we should also have a generic one for tools not
> running under any particular DE.
> 
> So, my questions:
> 
> 1. Can we add back a defaults.list ?

I don't see the point of doing that. The default GNOME values aren't interesting
for anything but GNOME. The various DEs will have different opinions on what
should be the default, so it's best that they take control of this setting.

> 2. Should other DE's ship their lists also in shared-mime-info or
> should they provide it as part of some other base package?
> On the one hand one place might be nice, on the other it would make
> shared-mime-info update more often and sometimes for things that don't
> affect you.

I don't mind the additional .list files being shipped with shared-mime-info,
as long as people are careful when they're making changes to shared-mime-info
git, don't need me to commit to the repository (I'm fine with adding access to
those who request it), and CC: themselves on the shared-mime-info bugs to
handle the DE specific problems.

It's a shame that we need to ship DE specific files in a generic package, but
that's really grand-fathered by the upstream and downstream maintainership of the
package (I've been maintaining upstream for 11 years, and the downstream package
for 8, so there's got to be a perk, right? :)

Cheers