Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel gmx de>]

Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org> writes:

> The users targetted by GNOME

Where can I find these "users target by Gnome"? So far I havn't seen a
single one of them, anywhere, even so I know a whole bunch of Gnome,
Windows and Mac users. Answers like that give me the feeling that
Gnome is targeted at some non-existing pretty imaginary userbase,
completly ignoring the active Gnome user base as it exist in the real
world.

> 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).

Users are not stupid, sure some might never figure out what went wrong
and how to fix that, but thats about it, there is a huge number of
users that will easily figure out what went wrong and how to fix it if
the underlying system isn't completly broken. Gnome should never ever
stand in the way of the user, be she completly clueless or not.

> 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.

Gnumeric should enforce the file-extension, Nautilus should warn if
file-extension renaming will break stuff, pretty simple. Has worked in
Windows for many years. Sure its not perfect, but by far I prefer that
over an file-content guessing that makes Nautilus or Gnome in general
almost unusable as soon as a new file-type comes ahead that the
file-content guesser-doesn't know anything about or worse when it
guesses it wrong.

> 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.

The first one is *trivialy* fixed by anybody with a very basic
knowledge of computers in seconds, the file-content-guessing requires
a bunch of experienced programmers, a bunch of luck and the right
phase of the moon to ever get fixed at all. Its completly unfixable by
the user, be he clueless or not. I consider that a very important
argument and please don't clame Gnome is designed for some stupid
imaginary non existing users. If Gnome doesn't work well for the
people that actually use it, than its broken, nothing more, nothing
less.

Or do you mean that anybody that knows something basic as to what a
filetype is use for should switch to another not-design-for-stupid-
users desktop environment?

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