Re: File selector talk writeup

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Wed, 2003-02-19 at 13:41, Thomas Leonard wrote:
> On Date: 16 Feb 2003 15:52:38 -0500 Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>
> wrote:
> 
> [...]
> > I assume if we got MIME type handling standardized gnome-vfs would
> > switch over to it. Hopefully then gnome-vfs could use GLib when
> > appropriate, though it would presumably need extra stuff on top as
> > well.
> 
> Hmm.. I don't think MIME handling will be considered standardized *until*
> gnome-vfs supports it ;-) Are there any major problems with the current
> draft[1]? The format of the binary magic files is still undecided (so it
> would be quite possible to just define it as whatever gnome-vfs is
> currently using, if that's written down explicitly somewhere). I'll try to
> look into it again in a few weeks if noone sends me anything for the
> spec sooner.
> 
> [1] http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~tal00r/info.html


(gnome-vfs doesn't have binary magic files as far as I know; the
gnome-vfs MIME system is pretty whacky, from everything I've
seen. But I think we can get it fixed to do something sane.)

To me, your spec looks like a fine solution to the 

 file => mime type

part of the MIME system problem. (Which is the part that we need
for GTK+, actually.) 

The question of how an application advertises support for a
MIME type, and of user preferences (*) also needs to be addressed,
but these are fundamentally simpler problems.

Getting KDE, OpenOffice, and especially Mozilla on board is going
to be the hard part of the political problem. (I say especially
Mozilla, because they've traditionally been very bone-headed
about system integration issues.)

A good step now might be to go to the KDE people, etc and say:

 Are you happy with this as a solution to the file identification
   problem?
 If not, what are your insuperable objections?

What we should avoid is another round of redefining the problem
as something more complex and endless discussion.

We're hoping that Jonathan Blandford will have some time to work
on at least the GNOME parts of this in a few weeks. But I wouldn't
wait for that.

Regards,
                                             Owen

(*) User preferences needs to be standardized for the case of
    e.g., Mozilla running within GNOME.