MIME info spec: Handling containers/multiple MIME types per glob pattern

[Jamie McCracken]

Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 
>>Also note that the pattern "*.pot" matches gettext templates and PPT
>>presentations. The MIME type can also only be determined sniffing the
>>contents.
> 
> 
> I'm sure there are lots of cases where the same extension gets used for
> multiple file types. Is there any particular reason we should tell the
> application that it needs to rescan the MIME type by sniffing instead?
> Can we not just always sniff the first N bytes of the file, by doing
> what the "file" program does to sniff metadata? It seems like this would
> solve a lot of problems, and I doubt it would cause any significant
> performance issues.

For local files that should be okay but for non-local NFS mounted ones 
that could have a significant performance hit.

Also, for non "File://" Gnome-VFS uri's you would want to use some kind 
of fast non-sniffing detection.

Ideally a file manager would initially use fast extension based mime 
types while asynchronously sniffing to make sure they are what they say 
they are.


-- 
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/