Kudos, Ryan! Marvelously put! =) Been trying to say this for ages, and couldn't find the words. > > I don't agree that it's dangerous in Nautilus like it is in Windows, since > nautilus does not hide the extension and also does not execute files because > they have a .exe extension. > > I do think encoding the file type in the name is stupid though. A file name > is exactly that, a name. It's not some data structure that you should add > fields to when you want to add features that require meta data. > > For example, say you want to add full access control lists to a file system. > The obvious way to do that is to store the ACL in some kind of meta data > along with the file or possibly the directory the file is in. > > If you went the file extension route you would encode the ACL in the file > name possibly with '-' as a delimiter. So if you had a text file called myfile > that can be accessed by bob and harry you would change the name to > myfile.txt-bob-harry. That would work and it would be faster, like file > extensions. It's just stupid. It's error prone and it forces the user to be > a programmer, just like file extensions do now. > > Just because Windows made a stupid choice a long time ago does not mean that > we should live with it. Especially when we are trying to make Linux more > usable to non programmers. Most of the non programmers I know still run into > problems with file extensions today. And that's because they are not > programmers and file typing should be a programmer issue. > > -- > Ryan Boder > http://www.bitwiser.org/icanoop -- Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) GPG key ID: 0xC1033CAD at keyserver.net
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