From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.0 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020311 Description of problem: I recently upgraded to the newest version of gnome-mime-data. Gnome-mime-data includes some mime type databases which seem redundant. /etc/gnome-vfs-mime-magic should be integrated with file's magic database (/usr/share/magic on my system). /usr/share/mime-info/gnome-vfs.mime should be integrated with /etc/mime.types. /etc/mailcap should also be used by GNOME. etc. If gnome-mime-data was integrated with the more traditional databases such as /etc/mime.types and /usr/share/magic, non-GNOME applications, such as file and mutt, could take advantage of GNOME database updates. Perhaps FHS or LSB should add mention of MIME related databases. This work should really be shared with KDE, command line tools, etc. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Notice that Skipjack includes /etc/gnome-vfs-mime-magic and /usr/share/magic Additional info:
You might look at http://www.freedesktop.org, go to about->gettinginvolved and check over the recent archives of xdg-list, there's some discussion of this topic. I think there's some reason people don't use the existing /usr/share/magic but I'm not sure what it is. I'll probably move this bug upstream shortly.
The folks at freedesktop.org have been discussing this issue. After some discussion on the XDG mailing list, https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/xdg-list, a draft MIME-info database standard was published. The subject of the mail thread was "Central MIME info database." The standard is available at http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tal00r/info.html. Please take a look -- it is a start.
There's more upstream progress on this in the works.
I'm going to close this bug on the Red Hat level; the work here is going to come from upstream, with help from some people here, but in any case we don't need a Red Hat specific bug in order to be sure it happens.