[mime-info database] inode types

[Jaap Karssenberg]

On Sun, 24 Aug 2003 01:34:39 +0200 David Faure wrote:
: I would agree with that, of course, but not everything is done from
: within the target application. When you click on a file in a file
: manager, it needs to figure out the mimetype (well, it probably did so
: when choosing the icon for the file, but anyway) : in such a case we
: need a global heuristic for determining the default mimetype, like the
: one described in the spec.

I think this exactly illustrates my point, maybe you want to configure
your file manager to open files as plain text by default, but maybe I
want to configure it to open an "open with" dialogue, or even a dialogue
to define a mimetype-rule based on this file. After all, a file manager
is just another program. The point is that with the current default I
_can't_ configure my file manager to distinguish between real plain text
files and files without a determined mimetype.

Another point is the method described by the spec to distinguish between
text/plain and application/octet-stream, I think it's a nice last resort
to determine the content type, but it should be implemented as a
separate library call that one can use when defining a handler for the
inode/file mimetype. (For example in rox, this handler could be a script
called 'inode_file', it would be nice to be able to use this method in
this script, possibly through some system command.)

-- 
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