Re: Inconsistency between mime-support, shared-mime-info and file for PHP files media types.
Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org> writes:
> All applications implementing the XDG MIME specification (e.g. through
> GIO or kdelibs) get the benefit of such features (and others such as
> aliasing).
> Yet people keep screaming that mime-support is awesome and don’t want to
> drop it.
Please don't distort other people's opinions to make rhetorical points.
We've had multiple discussions on this topic, and very few people were
expressing the opinion that mime-support was better than the XDG MIME
system, let alone "awesome." They were, rather, pointing out that they
use a bunch of applications that don't USE the XDG MIME system, and
therefore its theoretical benefits aren't actually useful to them right
now.
I think there's general agreement that in an ideal world everything would
use the XDG MIME system or something equally rich and not the old metamail
system. But we can't fix every piece of software that we use overnight,
particularly given that the conversion from a metamail-style system to the
XDG MIME system is not exactly a trivial endeavor for any piece of
software that uses MIME heavily.
That's the reason why people are pursuing generating the metamail-style
database *from* the XDG MIME specification so that we can use a richer
specification in as many places as possible but fall back on the previous
standard for applications that still use it.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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