Re: [rox-devel] MIME type configuration

[Thomas L. <ta...@le...>]

On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Simon Britnell wrote:

> I recently downloaded ROX-Filer and I'm so impressed I'm thinking of 
> building a mini-distro around it :)

Interesting! What distro would it be based around?

> The only thing I dislike about it so far is the complexity (relative to 
> doing everything else in ROX-Filer) of associating files with apps.  As 
> far as I can see, it requires editing a text file to add a line with the 
> mime-type and the file patterns/extensions of the files that use that 
> mime type to mime info and then (easily) setting up the association 
> through ROX-Filer.  I noticed this particularly when I set up LyX.

Yep, this bit needs work...

The best thing would be if

- installing Lyx added a lyx.mime file somewhere sensible
and
- running it without one added it to the user's Choices/MIME-info

But that's not going to work for all apps, so...

> I propose to modify the association setup so that if a file is being 
> associated which doesn't match any mime type patterns, it gives it a 
> mime type automatically rather than trying to set the association for 
> text mime type.

'automatically'? How? Some things might depend on a having a valid MIME type
so you'll need to be a bit careful here. At the very least, make sure the
user specifies the media type (image/text/audio/etc). The subtype could
default to x-extension, eg a .lyx file would suggest:

	application/x-lyx

> Naturally, I don't want to do this if (for some reason I haven't seen) 
> it's a bad thing(tm).  Please let me know what you think before I grab 
> the CVS version and look at it on the weekend.

It sounds like a good idea. Perhaps you could post some more details about
how it would work (internally and interface) for discussion here?

[ file-type issues usually stir up quite a debate - last time I think the
vote was for some kind of AI system to sort things out ;-) ]


Thomas Leonard
-- 
ta...@us...
The ROX desktop (free/GPL) : http://rox.sourceforge.net