Re: Unidentified subject!

[Tom Tromey <tromey cygnus com>]

>>>>> "jb" == jbnivoit  <jbnivoit@ix.netcom.com> writes:

>> Then, down the road, when this nice filetype->app automapping
>> scheme is in place, it'll make more sense to have a metadata system
>> which can store the 'real' mimetype of a file, instead of just
>> inferring the mimetype from the extension.

jb> The right way to do that is to have the FS handle it (as i believe
jb> the BeOS FS does, and the Mac has something related to that
jb> too). However, in the case of GNOME, we don't want to modify
jb> anything in the FS. So maybe the solution would be to have
jb> something like 'resource forks' stored in files that users don't
jb> see but can still be manipulated... Why not use dot files to do
jb> this?

You obviously missed the whole `metadata' discussion.

See http://www.cygnus.com/~tromey/gnome/metadata.html for a
more-or-less accurate idea of what we decided to do.

See gnome-libs/libgnome/gnome-metadata.[ch] for the implementation.
It now includes some documentation in the special comment format
(these comments will eventually be extracted into the reference
manual).


There's currently one big missing piece of the metadata
implementation, and that is a way to guess a file's mime type based on
its contents.  I'll do this eventually if nobody else does.


So right now there are really just two ways to characterize a file: by
matching its name, or by a piece of `type' metadata that is directly
attached to it.  I'm unaware of any programs that actually use the
metadata feature (yet).

Tom