Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

> The reason for this is that a)
> is the case of a users error and trivially fixed, most programms can
> even simply avoid this to happen at all by forcing a correct suffix.
> b) however is the result of the user doing nothing wrong but the
> computer going goofy and leaving the user with no way to fix this,
> basically rendering the filemanager unusable for some types of files.
>

The users targetted by GNOME won't have any clue how to fix a misdetection of 
the mime type of a file whatever the mime type detection scheme is (by 
extension or mime-sniffing). They'll know about "files created by the 
spreadsheet app", they can't be expected to know they are gnumeric files 
which should have a .gnumeric extension for Nautilus to properly open them.
So the "file extension detection misbehaviour is more easily fixed than 
sniffing misbehaviour" isn't a really good argument in favour of file name 
matching to my eyes.

Christophe