Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

[Ingo Ruhnke <grumbel gmx de>]

Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com> writes:

> I don't name my files with msdos extensions, why should I?

Because that is how the rest of the world handles file. Its the
smallest common denominator. Its like Windows people sending out World
documents, hey after all its Windows, so way should I care?

> this is UNIX.

Looking around in Unix I find a whole lot of programms that either
depend on file-extension (IIRC apaches mimetype detection) or which
would be a whole lot harder to use without them (shell without color
highlighting, some file-dialogs without filter, etc.).

> as has been said 100 times at least (or maybe I've just gotten dup
> mails), submit a bug report and a sample file for each one it sniffs
> wrongly - it if sniffs incorrectly, then that is a bug that should get
> fixed.

I repeat, its not about a file gets sniffed wrongly, its about the
user being completly unable to do anything about it. There are
thousands of file formats out there that nautilus doesn't know
anything about and that could get potentioally wrong detected, should
I fill a bug report for each of them? And how do we handle the raw
file-formats, simply let them get detected as some funny random file,
each of them a different one?

> the complaint about what editors come up in the right-click context menu
> is also configurable via the user's mime-type settings dingus too,
> right? why doesn't the original author simply add his favourite editor
> to that?

Wouldn't I then edit the wrong mime-type? Wouldn't that be just a
sloppy workaround over the symtoms? After all I want to get the
file-detected write, not clobber other mime-types with stuff that they
don't need.

> anyways, this thread is never going to end because no one is going
> to back down from their standpoint.

Which should kind of show that the current situation is far from
perfect.

> the only way for this to be dealt with is for someone to submit it
> to bugzilla and let someone objective make the call.

I'll try my luck...

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