Bundles, a draft specification

[Mildred]

Le Mon 03/09/2007 à 17:45 Thomas Leonard à écrit:
> On Sun, 02 Sep 2007 12:20:12 +0200, Mildred wrote:
> 
> In what way are they handled differently?`

Normal directories, when you open them, you can view its contents in
the file manager. Bundles are like files in the sense that they have a
mime type different from inode/directory and when you open them, it's
generally with an appropriate application that will do specific things.

For example a bookmark bundle is opened by the browser (not the file
manager) that:
- load the page if connected to the Internet
- show the cached version if not connected

There, the advantage of the bundle, it is if you use a filemanager not
compatible with bundles, you can still open it and find the link, and
more important, the cached version of the page.


> > The basic bundle specification just describe the structure of a
> > bundle. This includes a database that stores mime types for all
> > files in the bundle.
> 
> Why are the MIME types not stored in the same way as for normal 
> directories? i.e. as extended attributes (if specified at all), or 
> guessed from the name or contents of the file otherwise.

Because extended attributes are not relyable (it depends upon the
filesystem). And because I think it is important it have the mime type
of files (and not just guess).
But of course, you are free not to use that. Maybe that's not so
important for a bundle and can be removed from the spec.

> > Then there are two others specifications, one that defines a
> > bookmark containing an URI and the cached version of the page the
> > URi refers to, and the others contains only a desktop file and
> > specifies that files managers should treat this bundle as if it was
> > the desktop file.
> 
> As an executable bundle? How does this differ from a normal
> application directory?
> 
>  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_directory

Doesn't really differ, in fact it is my inspiration to write this
specification. But here, instead of execute an application that is
inside the bundle, you can open it with any application.

I don't know if it is interesting though.

Because I didn't found a specification for bundles as they are in Mac
OS X and a way for a file manager like nautilus to detect them, I wrote
my own specification. But I'm open to everything.

> > Please tell me what you think about this. This is still a draft I
> > just wrote.
> 
> Some clarifications would be useful.

Is it enough ?

As I said, if we can use the same specification as OS X bundles, I
would be happy. But I have no idea how they detect bundles. If it is by
extension, I think it is evil and I don't want it, if it is by extended
attributes, unfortunately that doesn't seems reliable enough.

Mildred

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Mildred Ki'lya
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