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

[Peter Dalgaard]

mpiktas at gmail.com writes:

> Hi,
> 
> On 03 Nov 2005 12:41:53 +0100, Peter Dalgaard <p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk> wr=
> ote:
> > 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-use=
> d
> > > Emacs family of editors.
> > >
> > > This looks as if it might be appropriate to the Linux binary packages f=
> or
> > > 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.

One further thought about this:

On SUSE, 

rpm -qif /usr/share/mime/

points at 

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fshared_2dmime_2dinfo

So I guess that the proper tree to bark at is the upstreams
maintainers of

http://freedesktop.org/~jrb/shared-mime-info-*.tar.gz

Instructions there say to submit new XML files to

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?product=shared-mime-info&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED

It would likely be a good idea to send them first to R-devel for review.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Øster Farimagsgade 5, Entr.B
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     PO Box 2099, 1014 Cph. K
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark          Ph:  (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard at biostat.ku.dk)                  FAX: (+45) 35327907