Re: Life after the GNOME freeze

[sml13 cornell edu]

On Wed, 16 Dec 1998, John Karcz wrote:

> I've been lurking around, thinking of using Gnome as a front end to
> some of my simulations.  It looks great!  I like the api.
> 
> Well, I have no artistic talent, but I've been playing with
> a couple of icons out of boredom, and have a couple of
> questions.
> 
> The first is this:  Do people want to have separate icons for
> things like *.png, *.xpm, and *.jpg files, rather than one
> general "image" icon?  I noticed in the gmc sources that there
> is a little label on the icon for *.ppm, say, to differentiate
> it from a *.jpg.  My opinion on this is that the label in the
> icon is redundant... the filename already clearly says the
> type of the image.  (I suspect, though, that there are cases
> where the extension on the filename is wrong, but I've personally
> never run into an image like this.)  I guess I feel that if the
> image is the same for each of the extensions, adding a copy
> of the extension to the icon won't clarify the view of the
> directory.
> 

I think mc uses a more sophisticated mechanism for determining file types 
than extensions, similar to the UNIX file command (anyone, am I right on 
this?...I thought I remembered reading it somewhere):

[shane@cx637332-a shane]$ cat > shane.xpm
/* XPM */
static char *shane[] = {
"2 2 2 1",
"b c #000000",
"w c #FFFFFF",
"wb",
"bw"
};
[shane@cx637332-a shane]$ cp shane.xpm asdfasdf.crap
[shane@cx637332-a shane]$ file asdfasdf.crap 
asdfasdf.crap: X pixmap image text
[shane@cx637332-a shane]$ 


shane