Re: Some thoughts about extensions and mime types

[Olaf Frączyk <olaf cbk poznan pl>]

On Wed, 2004-02-04 at 00:35, Curtis C. Hovey wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-03 at 06:06, 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.
> 
> Medusa *did that*, and did it poorly.  It is now a user space
> application.  When Medusa is split into separate search and metadata
> apps it would be viable.  The rich content management and multi-user
> plans of Storage are more in line with this feature.
> 
> For the present, I'm concerned with user-level applications.  I will not
> consider a multi-user system until GNOME has a reliable metadata
> database.
So, maybe we should just wait?
Such databases will be really huge, as having millions of files is
nothing unusual. Just for mime types you will need about 150MB per 1
million of files. (It is with assumption that per average file we use
150 bytes). Next think if you have 50 users or more.
Next think of users with quotas.

Personally I think that it is not worth to write per user solution. It
will be slower, it will take too much space on disk, it will be less
secure. With multi-user solution most of examining may be done at night,
when nobody is working.

Regards,

Olaf