Re: Suggestion for file type detection approach

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

On Friday 26 December 2003 05:38 pm, Dalibor Petricevic wrote:
> On 12/26/2003 04:24 PM, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> >>The reason for this is that a)
> >>is the case of a users error and trivially fixed, most programms can
> >>even simply avoid this to happen at all by forcing a correct suffix.
> >>b) however is the result of the user doing nothing wrong but the
> >>computer going goofy and leaving the user with no way to fix this,
> >>basically rendering the filemanager unusable for some types of files.
> >
> > The users targetted by GNOME won't have any clue how to fix a
> > misdetection of the mime type of a file whatever the mime type detection
> > scheme is (by
>
> [...]
>
> O.K. a little OT:
> WHO do you mean when you say "users targetted by GNOME"?!

This has been beaten to death in various threads in the last months/years. I'm 
thinking about my parents, sisters, neightbours, for whom a computer isn't a 
really fun toy, but a tool which constantly annoy them while they are trying 
to get work done. I'm also thinking to the various people who ask me for help 
from time to time because I'm 'into computers'. I'm more interested in making 
a desktop these kind of people can use without needing help than arguing 
about "file name matching being better than content sniffing because it's 
easier to fix problems with file name matching because everyone should know 
by heart that excel files have a .xls extension, pictures have a .jpg 
extension, ..."

Christophe