Shared Mime Library 0.5 review

Shared Mime Library is my implementation for libsharedmime

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 17K Developer: Matthew Allen

0

Shared Mime Library is my implementation for libsharedmime. It reads the Shared Mime Info database and returns you the MIME-TYPE of a file. Freedesktop make this database freely available, but they don't seem to be distributing a library to read it anymore (It's no where in their CVS that I can find).

It is different to the freedesktop version in the following ways:

Licensed under LGPL instead of the GPL at aid all developers. *sigh*
Has NO dependencies. Which is an important feature in this world of tangled packages all depending on each other.
Probably not as fast?
Not as complete (yet)?

To install the package firstly you need the Shared Mime data files. Which you can get from here. Then download and unpack libsharedmime and:

% make
# make install

What's New in This Release:
Added code to check for a text file if the content lookup fails, if it matches it gets a 'text/plain' type.
Stopped the content lookup being performed on directories.
Fixed a bug in the magic matching code that caused valid matches to fail. This means that some files will now return the correct mime type as opposed to a default "not found" type.