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

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Apr 18 20:45:55 UTC 2007


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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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