Re: using deprecated gnome_mime instead of gnome_vfs_mime (was file moniker patch)

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi,

On Thu, 30 Nov 2000, Darin Adler wrote:
> Why do you call the MIME database and MIME sniffing a trivial hack? 
> It's a piece of code that's hard to get right, and we've been working
> on making it better for months.
  
        This reminds me ( on a totaly different track ); I was recently
reading through some parts of the gnome-vfs api and I noticed these APIs:

const char *gnome_vfs_get_mime_type_for_buffer
                (GnomeVFSMimeSniffBuffer *buffer);

        I assume this function uses the mime magic information to try and
determine the type, and returns NULL if it can't characterize it
precicely. Then I saw:

gboolean gnome_vfs_sniff_buffer_looks_like_text   
                (GnomeVFSMimeSniffBuffer *buffer);

        And I thought fair enough, perhaps text is a very special case for
sniffing; then I saw:

gboolean    gnome_vfs_sniff_buffer_looks_like_mp3 
                (GnomeVFSMimeSniffBuffer *buffer);
  
        And I was slightly worried. Are we going to gather a great series
of looks_like_my_grandma type calls ? or should the (fuzzy) sniffing API  
be something like:
  
gboolean gnome_vfs_sniff_buffer_looks_like (buffer, char *mime_type);

        So; then I looked at the implementation to try and work out what's
going on and I see in the get_mime_type_for_buffer function:
  
        /* if no match, try the algorithmic sniffers */
        if (gnome_vfs_sniff_buffer_looks_like_mp3 (buffer)) {
                return "audio/x-mp3";
        }
  
        But no sniff for text.
  
        And it looks ( from the comment ) as if a more general framework  
was intended, with perhaps pluggable mime type sniffers; is this the
case? it would seem more reasonable ( to me ), to register a list of
sniffer functions that could be handled genericly, perhaps with a degree  
of certainty ranking depending on how smelly the stream is to them ?
  
        Regards,

                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot