loud kfilemetainfo thinking

[Jos van den Oever]

2007/1/16, Jakob Petsovits <jpetso at gmx.at>:
> On Tuesday, 16. January 2007 00:26, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > You've probably looked at KFileMetaInfo and KFileMimeTypeInfo. In
> > moving these classes forward to the semantic desktop, I think there is
> > quite a bit of low-hanging fruit to be gotton by keeping large parts
> > of the API but changing the implementation of metadata reading and
> > writing.
> >
> > I will give you a small idea of what i think should happen to these
> > classes. In my opinion the prominent role of the mimetype should be
> > abandoned.
>
> Note: It seems that Gnome developers also want to revamp the mimetype system,
> even if a bit differently than you described it:
> http://blogs.gnome.org/view/cneumair/2007/01/14/0
> http://joeshaw.org/2007/01/14/452
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Usability/SpecEnhancedPreferredApps
>From what I see in the links, the issues addressed are not issues in
KDE where the context menu already allows selection of different
applications for opening a file.

>
> Maybe there's a chance to cooperate on this issue and keep improving the
> fd.o mimetype database instead of undertaking a KDE-only solution.
>
> > We cannot continue working on the assumption that mimetype
> > always accurately predicts which files contain which fields and that
> > one mimetype maps to one KFilePlugin. A mimetype is just one of many
> > metadata that can be associated with a file. It is well possible that
> > a file has multiple mimetypes. An openoffice text document arguably
> > also has the mimetypes application/x-zip and application/octet-stream.
> > When getting data from this file you might be interested in the
> > zipfile aspects of it.
>
> The mimetype already has this information in form of the X-KDE-IsAlso property
> in the mimetype's desktop file. (For example, see any of the source file
> mimetypes, say, kdelibs/mimetypes/text/x-java.desktop.)
> One could make a point by saying that this information is not properly used,
> but I wouldn't blame it on the mimetypes themselves.
>
> -- Jakob
>