[Fwd: shared-mime-info: image/x-fits -> image/fits]

[Alexey Shuvaev]

Hello gnome maintainers!

Just realized I'm jumping over the maintainers' heads :))
For now this message is blocked while I'm not on the xdg list...
Should I continue tracking this issue or some of you will step in?
Also, this mime type 'strict matching' could beat someone else, so FWIW.

Alexey.

----- Forwarded message from Alexey Shuvaev <shuvaev at physik.uni-wuerzburg.de> -----

From: Alexey Shuvaev <shuvaev at physik.uni-wuerzburg.de>
Organization: Universitaet Wuerzburg
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:40:51 +0100
To: xdg at lists.freedesktop.org
Bcc: Alexey_Shuvaev/uni-wuerzburg
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)
Subject: shared-mime-info: image/x-fits -> image/fits

Hello all!

The long history short: FITS image mime type is officially registered
since 2005. So it is named image/fits and application/fits now.
The history of acception:
	http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/fits/mime/
RFC 4047:
	http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc4047.txt

Some more background information. FITS = Flexible Image Transport System.
It is used to store, for example, astronomical data (images, but not only).
The format rather complicated and is suitable to store many kinds of data
(n-dimensional arrays of data, geo-coordinates, a lot of key-value pairs,
etc...). So application/fits should be used to describe such general
purpose files. However RFC 4047 defines image/fits as a type to
describe FITS files with some limitations intended to ensure
these files could be displayed by the browser.
I am not sure how feasible would it be to add application/fits to
freedesktop.org.xml (almost nobody uses it), on the other hand
shared-mime-info does not provide software to actually view or modify
registered types, it is only a database of commonly used ones.
As of image/fits, I think it should be fixed.

Why am I concerned? Well, I am the maintainer of x11-toolkits/slgtk
package for FreeBSD and it includes gdk-pixpuf-loader for FITS images.
It used to work with gtk-2.12 series but suddenly refused to work with
gtk-2.14. It appears that the loader says it recognizes image/fits
type while shared-mime-info contains only image/x-fits.
Renaming one of the above makes the loader to work again.

Anyway, please inform me on your decision(s) as I have to fix the FreeBSD
package one way or another. And, please, CC me, I'm not on the list.

Thanks,
Alexey.

----- End forwarded message -----