Comment 18 for bug 236602

Woohoo, the magics of standards.
@Jonathan: That would not change anything because that only updates the ksycoca but not freedesktop stuff (because by spec the installing application is supposed to do that stuff, not the desktop's implementation of the freedesktop standards), fspot being a mono/gtk+ app, doesn't care about ksycoca though ;-)

@Milan: The fact that GNOME uses it, doesn't mean that update-desktop-database is a standard, which to my knowledge it is not. It is a freedesktop.org software project, but no more and no less than that. Calling it a standard is like saying Tango is a standard, which would make GNOME not comply with the standard.

Anyway.
Lets recap.
* The freedesktop specifications/standards for desktop files (which list associated mimetypes) and for shared-mime (which lists mimetypes that can be used by desktop files) do not define update-desktop-database as standard of any kind, neither do they reference desktop-files-utils
* The freedesktop shared-mime spec however, lists update-mime-database as tool of choice for updating the possible mimetypes (which should be working just fine, because that is implemented in KDE)
* The linking of application=>mimetype is, just like managing the list of applications, up to the desktop's specific implementation (as suggested in the desktop-entry-spec)
* fspot either does not use GNOME's builtin parser, or GNOME in fact uses update-desktop-database as default parser. So, either fspot needs to depend on desktop-file-utils or the GNOME library that is responsible for reading the data provided by update-desktop-database needs to depend on desktop-file-utils.