Shared-mime checking order

[Christian Neumair]

Am Mittwoch, den 01.08.2007, 07:20 +0200 schrieb Alexander Larsson:
> Given all the people swearing about the current gnome mime warning
> dialog I'd say it get things wrong often enough to matter.
> 
> Often this is due to complicated contailer formats (like avi or mov)
> rather than someone messing with the file.

Actually most of the container format problems are solved.

A more significant problem is that network protocols do not support
parallel connections and thus sniffing without lag, and we have to
resort to extensions anyway (.txt on FTP, for instance). It's just not
feasible to read() remote files before opening them, at least not if we
do not cache the results [which is done for thumbnailing].

This shows one of the major (as far as I know unsolved) problems of
modern desktop / network file system integration: Is it a good idea to
determine information about remote files and cache it, taken that we
can't properly uniquely identify remote files - except with an URI/mtime
tuple, but as they change, you'll have to assume to have a completely
new file system object and throw away all and re-read file info (MIME
type, thumbnails, metadata and so on).

-- 
Christian Neumair <cneumair at gnome.org>