mime and freedesktop (was: Desktop Icons)

[Olivier Fourdan]

Hi Edscott,

AFAIK Thomas is actively contributing this standard and Rox applies to
it.

Cheers,
Olivier.

On Tue, 2003-09-30 at 17:10, edscott wilson garcia wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 22:36, Biju Chacko wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > BTW, what's the freedesktop icon spec?
> > Good grief, Edscott. You really need to browse freedesktop.org sometime. There
> > are several standards that impact on the behavior of a filemanager. The
> > shared-mime-info spec is probably the most important.
> 
> /me goes to look at freedesktop.org. 
> Well, well, well. 
>   Freedesktop proposes using xml for mime information. That's good. Xffm
> does that. But there are some differences. Xffm uses a single file
> (following the gnome way), while freedesktop uses twenty thousand score
> files (following the kde way). Keeping tabs on twenty thousand score
> files is very inefficient, so freedesktop suggests hacking up a binary
> database. But Benny does not like hacks...
> 
>   And there is one thorn drawing blood...
>   If mime info boils down to one file (xml or binary) shared by all
> desktops, which desktop in a multi-desktop environment, will provide for
> it? 
>   "I will!", says K. 
>   "No", says G., with arms raising to the sky. "I will!".
>   But B. in the corner mumbles "Kids... Don't you recognise me?"
> 
>   So, 
>   - mime info in xml: good. 
>   - single file for all: bad. That's B.'s game.
> 
> Nonetheless, there is a current "de facto" MIME standard by M. ---and
> which even B. follows:
> 
> mime information contains the following elements:
> - (char *) application mime-type according to simple file extension.
> - (char *) associated executable program for each mime-type
> - (char *) associated icon for each mime-type
> 
> K.'s implementation adds the indispensable bloat factor:
> - (array of char *) program description, one for each language
> 
> While xffm accommodates all by using
> - (array of char *) associated executable programs for each mime-type
> 
> No trouble exists to make xffm able to read mime info provided by G., K.
> and B. on the fly. But is that really necessary? The bloat reduction
> formula calls for this to be done beforehand so that the extra code is
> not necessary. And since the mime format of G. and K. are still moving
> targets, I would much rather do that than deal with the subsequent bugs
> which nobody will have time to fix.
> 
> 
> 
> 
>   
> 
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-- 
Olivier Fourdan - fourdan at xfce.org
   
   Interoperability is the keyword, uniformity is a dead end. 
   http://www.xfce.org