Re: [Usability]File renaming/extensions

[David Lazaro <david lazaro eresmas net>]

On Tue, 2002-08-20 at 14:47, Carlos Morgado wrote:
> [...]
> i wasn't clear.
> extension IS NOT an unix concept.

You are right; this is a problem inherited from other OSs. The same
thing applies to Mac OS. In the past they had this extension manager
that was very similar to the mime types concept, only proprietary. Then,
in their incarnation of NeXTSTEP, also inherited the extension concept
raw. They got, as they like to say, the "power of UNIX" but also most of
its classical problems. As a related problem, they solved the user
centered case of the traditional case sensitive file system very right,
IMHO[1]. Their solution to the "metadata question" wasn't very
imaginative, though, it was the same one Microsoft applied in Windows
95. It works but doesn't resolve anything; it only hides the problem.

That lack of imagination is way John Siracusa, the author of the second
link I sent in the previous message, criticizes Apple for.

I would like better, for example, the approach of the future RaiserFS
vision, in which a file can have a fork called "mime-type" which
contains the (surprise, surprise) MIME type of the data. The only
problems are that that filesystem doesn't exist yet and that GNOME must
also support filesystems without that feature set anyway.

Thoughts, opinions?

Cheers,

David

[1] See "The Challenges of Integrating the Unix and Mac OS Environments"
by Wilfredo Sánchez, presented in USENIX 2000.
http://www.mit.edu/people/wsanchez/papers/USENIX_2000/