Why is Fedora a multimedia disaster? - Here is why.

[Gérard Milmeister]

On Wed, 2007-04-18 at 20:19 +0100, Chris Jones wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 April 2007 2:29:40 am Hikaru Amano wrote:
> > On 4/18/07, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 20:04 +0200, Valent Turkovic wrote:
> > > > Who decided to give video ogg vorbis filenames same extension as
> > > > audio ogg vorbis files? That feels totally wrong to me. That will
> > > > confuse a lot of people.
> > >
> > > And (confuse) applications.
> > >
> > > I think it's a bad idea, too.  There's a lot of things which go by the
> > > name alone, and that makes it harder to do two different actions for
> > > what seems like the same file type.
> 
> 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.
-- 
Gérard Milmeister
Langackerstrasse 49
CH-8057 Zürich