Re: Some thoughts about extensions and mime types

[Olaf Frączyk <olaf cbk poznan pl>]

On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 12:06, Alexandre Hautequest wrote:
> Olaf Fra;czyk wrote:
> > To have secure type-file detection we need File Type Detector (FTD) on
> > local computer. It has to be run as root to be able to read all files.
> > It has to examine every file and such examination has to be really
> > reliable (much more that sniffing today). FTD has to maintain secure
> > database. In such database we need: filename (full path), mtime, ctime,
> > filetype.
> 
> Should we wrote a patch for medusa?! It does some of the job already.
I wrote only a proposal. 
I think that people who write nautilus, gnome-vfs should decide if my
proposal is good. If it will be fast enough.
If it is, I think that we have to find out what is really necessary.
Applications (and nautilus) should be offered with single API covering
these things. And I think that it has to be written in such way, that it
will make possible to change database backend in the future.

The other problem is that FTD has to be able to monitor filesystem for
changes, to be able to check only files which have changed
(incrementally) . Currently, fam is not offering recursive monitoring. I
don't know, but maybe DMAPI would be OK for it.

We need to resolve problem with removable media. At the time we examine
files on them, the user will be not able to umount them. So we need to
decide if removable media should be excluded from type-file detection,
or it should be done only on demand (when opening directory, etc.).
Other solution is, that we catch umount event and stop examining
particular filesystem. This would be the best, I think.

I think that other people will find other problems. 
All of them should be sorted out before implementation, so we will have
clean and robust solution.

Regards,

Olaf