
The situation for certs is probably fairly parallel: on unix, it would probably be an advantage as Python would automatically follow distro decisions about cert chains, while on windows trying to use a system cert store would probably be a disaster.
Yeah, fair enough. If it's stable and just works on Linux, this would be an advantage.
An application can choose to explicitly ignore the system mimetypes file, by the way.
My main concern is that it could be broken out of the box on Windows (mimetypes currently is), and callers have to go out of their way to find this workaround. I'm not familiar with Unix/Linux, but on Windows, if it's anything like mimetypes it'll be really hard to get consistent behaviour across different boxes/versions from the registry, or wherever certs might be stored on Windows. I'd much rather have a slightly outdated but consistent experience by default. -Ben