Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

[Adam Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

> I've spent some time today thinking about the costs and benefits of the
> two approaches used today in GNOME to determine the MIME Type of a file.
> Also, I've done some experiments and tweakings to check the impact that 
> file sniffing has over nautilus performance. It's impressive. See below.

Why not support recording the mime-type of a file as meta-data (EA) on
filesystems that support it (every one of them at this point?).  It
would take awhile to be adopted by most/all GNOME apps but seems (IMHO)
to clearly be the right way to do it.   If GNOME VFS supported it then
it seems it would be easy to implement for alot of applications.

File extenstions are just DUMB and EASILY broken.  Sniffing is expensive
and unreliable.