Re: File selector talk writeup

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2003 at 02:14:02PM -0500, Ettore wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-02-16 at 15:50, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > Ideally yes they would be consistent.  However, there are several
> > considerations that work to separate things.
> > 
> > - Some formats are not especially amenable to fast type sniffing.
> >   Particularly the compound file based formats.
> >
> (...)
> > - Another area where needs diverge is when handling more amourphous
> >   or generic formats.
> 
> I still don't understand the objection.  :-)  The app and the file
> manager should still be consistent in their knowledge of types.
> 
> What you said above sounds to me like an explanation of why type
> guessing through binary sniffing doesn't quite work; that's why we have
> file name extensions.

I don't object to doing it but I am very suspicious of the notion
that we could get accurate knowledge quickly enough to be useful for
large directories.  File extensions are a cheesy fall back.  The
Eazel folk argued long and hard to find a way of sniffing .xml.gz
files before admitting defeat and falling back on extensions.

If the sniffed types are used for filtering we can run into problems
where mis-sniffed content can not be loaded.