[arch-general] Automatic File Associations Alloting

[clemens fischer]

Jayesh Badwaik wrote:

> Yeah. I too have my personal stuff for that. I have a script actually
> which uses a file and from that creates the default.list file which is
> then used by anyone who cares to use it (Firefox, KDE etc). But I am
> now tired of the custom stuff. I just wanted to explore. And XML
> seemed quiet universal in the sense.
> 
> And I have heard a lot but I still don't get it. Why is XML a beast?
> I have read everything from every source where people have even given
> point wise listings. But I am not able to appreciate anything. XML is
> just a way of writing data, right? Instead of parsing text you parse
> tags and their values. The only difference and advantage is that the
> stuff is more human readable.

I was talking from the viewpoint of the task you were trying to solve.
You want a way to handle mimetype associations for file objects.
There's not much info needed.  XML is not the best format to parse
without bloaty libs.  If you want a script, a simpler (oneline) format
might be more practical.  It is also easier to have a simple format when
you later need to write adapters in case you still want XML.

Whatever.  You still might consider using two or more databases if you
want a hierarchy:  user-choices -> program-choices -> system-choices.
No need to merge into one database if the later choices are fallbacks.


clemens