Gérard Milmeister wrote:
On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 15:45 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
Gérard Milmeister wrote:
Applications that simply go by the extension name are doing it wrong and
should be fixed. As it has already be pointed out there are better ways.
Take an application such as nautilus. AFAIK, nautilus (or gnome-vfs, or
whatever) used to look inside each file to determine what mime type it
was, in order to display it alongside the name and attach an icon. This
was very slow, since it had to open each file in a directory. Now it
looks first at the extension, and if that does not determine the type,
it looks inside it. Sometimes it guesses wrongly, and it makes you know
about it when you try to open the file.
Looking inside a file to determine a mime type is just another hack. The
only correct way to do it is to attach meta-data to each file (using
extended attributes, for example). However this would mean quite a
radical change of how files are created, modified etc.
There's also no reason to think that getting meta-data would be any
faster than getting data from the file - or that you would want a
filesystem designed with something other than getting the file data as a
higher priority.
Meta-data (using extended file attributes) would be faster, since it
wouldn't involve opening the file and trying to guess the file type from
the file content. If you have selinux enabled, each file access involves
accessing extended file attributes.
And how does that work out for you when you keep your multimedia files
on exteral USB drives for portability among linux/mac/windows boxes?
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
