Comment 66 for bug 18995

This subject has, of course, already been talked on FreeDesktop. No exactly from this point of view, but for setting up a consensus on the best way to conceive the MIME database. It seems that Gnome and KDE have both common and specific ways of handling that. I will not enter in the details because I don't want to make technical mistakes.

Speaking for Gnome (taken from http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-January/009111.html), each folder which contain .desktop files, also maintains two other files : defaults.list which list default associations, and mimeinfo.cache which list all applications link to a MIME type. You find examples in /usr/share/applications/. You find also a defaults.list file in /etc/gnome/. Those file are system level settings. Then, there is the MIME database which is well described here: http://library.gnome.org/admin/system-admin-guide/stable/mimetypes-database.html.en.

xdg-mime could have a new parameter to retrieve all registered applications for a MIME type. The <email address hidden> seems to be the best place for talking about that.

There are 4 (or 5) complementary steps to provide a consistent experience to the user:
- 1: call xdg-open or xdg-mime to get the default registered application,
- 2: call (a non existing) xdg-mime list to get all registered applications for a MIME type for a short listing of available applications,
- 3: find another way to get all the application with .desktop files installed on the computer for a complete listing of available applications,
(- 4 (optional): get relevant applications available from synaptic for this task (would be great but difficult),)
- 5: in an advanced mode, propose a field to enter an application path (could be a way for preferably access the paths stored in the $PATH variable.

Would be great to have here the knowledge of concerned people, I mean, Gnome dev and FreeDesktop active subscribers on the subject. This is highly too much technical to be embraced so simply.