[Rd] shared-mime-info (PR#8278)

[Vaidotas Zemlys]

Hi,

On 03 Nov 2005 12:41:53 +0100, Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wrote:
> ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk writes:
>
> > We do not usually put features in R which are specific to just some
> > distributions of some OSes, and in this case to one editor on those.
> > We do not for example include the ESS mode for the much-more-widely-used
> > Emacs family of editors.
> >
> > This looks as if it might be appropriate to the Linux binary packages for
> > R, so I suggest you contact their maintainers.  But my understanding is
> > that this is an issue for gedit and not for R.  Indeed .R is just a
> > convention (one of many choices, including .r and .q) for R itself.
> >
> > I do wonder why you concentrated on .R files and not .Rd files, where I
> > find syntax highlighting more useful.
>
> Mime-types shouldn't be distribution-specific or even editor-specific,
> should they? The whole point is that they can be used for things like
> email attachments that pass from one OS to the other.
>
> It might be useful to have the mime-type definitions for R (and Rd)
> files centralized in R core, with the appropriate OS conventions
> systematized. But I think we need to know more. Who keeps track of
> mime-types? Can we just grab text/x-R (and text/x-Rd and
> application/x-Rdata)? To which extent the XML format a standard; is it
> only used by particular applications?
>
>
As far as I know, at least in Debian, the mimetypes are tracked by
shared-mime-info package. The upstream is freedesktop.org. I do not
know about oficial standarts, but Gnome and KDE tries to adher to some
of the freedesktop.org standarts. I can confirm that mimetypes
provided by shared-mime-info are widely used in Gnome, for some time
now.

Vaidotas Zemlys
--
Doctorate student, http://www.mif.vu.lt/katedros/eka/katedra/zemlys.php
Vilnius University