Re: Magic is useless!

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-01-04 at 09:49, Raphael Bosshard wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> There is currently a thread running in the reiserfs-maillist about
> "replacing" file-magic with an additional file-attribut called
> "File-Type", containing the Mime-Type of the file.
> 
> Hans Reiser is willing to implement this into Reiser4, but more work has
> to be done, especialy in user-space. Allmost all applications will have
> to be patched or rewritten, but we think thats worth it.
> 
> The current solutions, File-Type identification via File-Magic or the
> Extension, are nothing more than a hacks.
> 
> I ask for the support of the gnome-team for this case. Also support from
> the other filesystem-teams is needed.

We can add support for this to GnomeVFS. We don't expose how the MIME
type detection is done in the VFS api anyway, so it wouldn't be terribly
difficult to use a metadata attribute when the file is stored on a
ReiserFS filesystem. The reason that we also need magic sniffing is that
we don't want the Macintosh dilemna where files get stripped of their
properties if you move them to other systems. Most major file formats
already have a detectable magic byte signaturate, though some of the now
prospering "human readable" formats using XML or whatever are a thorn in
the side (particularly if they are compressed, grr). But this would be a
good complement.

Something that would be *really* nice to have, while I'm on the subject
of filesystem metadata, is support for extended metadata (i.e. "user"
defined metadata, where user == application programmer). It would be
nice to tack information like the icon position or whatever directly
into a file's metadata.

-Seth