after make install when building and installing from source, the following two actions need to be performed for the OS (Linux Mint, probably other Debuntus) to load the file associations for thumbnailing and opening .slvs files in the desktop environment.

# Update application metainfo so user can open .slvs files natively (by double click) in file manager
$ sudo update-desktop-database /usr/local/share/applications/

# Update mime data for .slvs files to be properly recognized; enables thumbnailer to work
sudo update-mime-database /usr/local/share/mime/

As an aside, SolveSpace is the only application on my system which uses /usr/local/share/ for these files. However, my research has shown that this is not wrong and may actually be most correct to spec.

On my system (Linux Mint) /usr/share/thumbnailers is what is used by default for thumbnailers and /usr/share/applications for the mime type information.

This seems to be a problem/feature the cmake files. I have only some experience with make - very little with actually writing or modifying the make system. I also acknowledge that cmake/make is not meant to handle these types of operations - such as updating system associations after an install.

anyone experienced with cmake to weigh in