Re: Dia-list digest, Vol 1 #758 - 5 msgs

[dialist <pvspam-dialist hacklab net>]

> But inventing new extensions just
> to convey whether  or not the file is compressed is not useful, given the
> other variables.  

We live in a legacy world. GNOME (KDE?) uses file extensions to
determine type, at least as far as I can tell (someone correct me if
wrong). I believe it goes so far as to use extension to determine MIME
type.

.gz.dia (as you similarly suggest) would still associate the file with
Dia, which is good, and a human could tell it was gzipped.

But I don't know that a computer would be able to tell this is a gzipped
Dia file, and so if you, say, right-clicked it and chose "View as Text"
it wouldn't know to decompress it first, whereas if you chose say
".gzdia" or something similar, it could be taught such.

We're overloading the "." operator to sometimes be a single extension,
sometimes multiple. And don't get me started on if your new company
called "Go Zone" names its diagram "gz.dia".

It's ugly. I'd actually say given the current mess we're in to create a
new extension ".gzdia" or whatever, and fix it when filesystems actually
store MIME types with files. (We'd do away with extensions entirely at
that time, would we not?)

-- 
Tim Ellis
Senior Database Architect
author, tedia2sql (tedia2sql.tigris.org)