Comment 10 for bug 570836

update-desktop-database complains about mime-types starting with zz-application, for example on a system with gnumeric installed:

Error in file "/usr/share/applications/fedora-gnumeric.desktop": "zz-application/zz-winassoc-xls" is an invalid MIME type ("zz-application" is an unregistered media type)

gnumeric upstream refuses to fix this, see:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=619303

I believe they are right in refusing to fix this, the zz-application/zz-winassoc-* mime-types, although not standards compliant, are widely used out there, see for example:
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/p8docs/v4r5m1/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.p8.doc%2Fadmin%2Fpublishing%2Fpub_supported_gold_list.htm
http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Word_Document_%28DOC%29
https://packetprotector.org/trac/browser/USB_dir_2.x/trunk/packetprotector/etc/dansguardian/lists/downloadmanagers/managedmimetypelist?rev=268

zz-application/zz-winassoc-* can thus be encountered in http / email mime headers in the wild. Thus it makes sense for applications who can handle them to specify so in their .desktop file.

I suggest adding zz-application to the known_fdo_media_types array like this was done with the chemical media type. The fact that currently desktop-file-utils warns over this each time a package post installation script runs update-desktop-database is very annoying. So annoying that almost all distros have a bug for tracking this, and if you google for zz-winassoc-xls the first 7 hits are all bugreports about this.

If you agree that zz-application should be added to the known_fdo_media_types array I'll happily provide a patch for this.

Thanks,

Hans