Servicetype inheritance (Re: kdenonbeta/kopete/libkopete)

[David Faure]

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On Tuesday 22 April 2003 22:16, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> A mimetype Axxx is a servicetype describing the ability to open files of type XXX. 
> X-KDE-Derived describes inheritance in terms of servicetypes.
Very true.

> So if you have a 
> servicetype that inherits from a certain mimetype Afoo, then you inherit the ability to
> open files of type FOO, ergo if you have a mimetype that inherits from a certain 
> mimetype Afoo, then you inherit the ability to open files of type FOO. In practice 
> that doesn't make sense because you would end up saying that text/plain inherits 
> from text/html.
Not sure what you mean here... but I agree that it doesn't make much sense :))

> What you want is an ability to tell that when a file is of a certain mimetype that this implies
> that this file meets the criteria of another mimetype as well: text/html is also text/plain.

Yes, like "A samba workgroup is also a dir".

> Those are two different concepts that should be treated as such. So I would go for solution 
> 2. I'm sure it will be more work but usually it pays off to have a design that reflects the
> underlying concepts.

Definitely - the difficult part is to actually define those underlying concepts.
But I like your definition very much.

> I would name it X-KDE-IsAlso.
Sounds good.

> I hope to get a similar property adopted in the shared 
> mimetype spec. (http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/shared-mime-info.html)
Indeed. IIRC he talked about aliases, but this is slightly different.

- -- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by TrollTech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
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