Excerpts from Mantas M.'s message of 2011-09-12 08:58:40 +0200:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2011 at 12:50:06AM +0200, Philipp Überbacher wrote:
> > Is this config file also managed through gconf or something? I mean I
> > really appreciate that it's a text file but it's the first time I heard
> > of it and it seems this kind of stuff changes faster than I can say wtf
> > (text files to xdg files to gconf to other xdg files). I'm really
>
> No. Both GNOME ("Open with"/"Preferred programs") and KDE 4 edit the file directly; Gconf is generally not used anymore for file type associations.
>
> See the "MIME Actions specification" on freedesktop:
>
> <http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/mime-actions-spec>
>
> > confused. I also wonder what the strange additional strings in there
> > mean, example:
> > application/x-extension-html=userapp-Firefox-3WKO0V.desktop
>
> "application/x-extension-html" probably means all files having the '.html' extension, regardless of automatically-determined MIME type. (For example, if you rename a .jpeg file to .html, it will *still* be detected as image/jpeg, but matching by extension will take priority.)
>
> "userapp-*.desktop" files are created when you manually specify the path to your program in the "Open With..." window (the 'other' choice).
Ok, thanks for the explanation, that makes it a bit clearer. I still
wonder which role the xdg-* tools play though. They're CLI-tools written
in bash, which one might think are supposed to help non-DE-users deal
with those settings, but if you try to use them without a DE running
they won't let you. At least that's true for xdg-settings,
here's an example:
$ xdg-settings --list
Known properties:
default-web-browser Default web browser
xdg-settings get default-web-browser
xdg-settings: unknown desktop environment
