Content types

[David Faure]

On Thursday 03 July 2008, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-06-11 at 11:30 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> 
> > I'm attaching patches for the shared-mime-info spec, for
> > update-mime-database (to create treemagic files) and a standalone
> > implementation of tree matching using the treemagic files (this will
> > become part of a future g_mount_guess_content_type() function in GIO).
> > If these additions are accepted, I will also prepare a patch to
> > add the content types that are currently defined in nautilus.xml
> > to freedesktop.xml.
> 
> 
> Its been a month since I sent out this proposal, and the only comment I
> have heard so far is that the name "Content types" may be slightly
> ambiguous. My proposal for addressing this is to change the section 
> title to "Content types for volumes", and stick with x-content for the
> type, since it is already in use. 
> 
> If there is no further feedback, I'd like to move ahead with adding this
> to the spec, since we want to implement content type sniffing in gvfs
> soon.

I have only seen this email today (we live in a world of far too many emails ;-)

The proposal seems reasonable to me.
I'm just wondering two things:

* will this create files like /usr/share/mime/x-content/image-dcf.xml, i.e. a "mimetype"
definition like for every other mimetype?
That would be fine; otherwise the MimeType field would be pointing to things
that are not known as mimetypes, and that triggers warnings :)

* this means a tree could have two or three mimetypes, i.e. inode/directory
plus x-content/audio-player plus x-content/video-player? What do you do when
clicking on it, i.e. how do you choose between a directory viewer, an app
associated with audio-player and an app assocaited with video-player?
I guess the solution is along the lines of "when the tree/medium has more
than one 'mimetype', ask the user"?
Generally I'm expecting problems due to the paradigm shift from
"a file/directory has ONE mimetype" to "a directory or medium can have
more than one mimetype". But I suspect that's fixed by having one mimetype
and optionally N content-types....
In fact, do I understand correctly that "medium" is like /dev/sdb1 and "tree" 
is the directory where /dev/sdb1 is mounted? - and that both would have
the same content types? (seems fine, just want to make sure I understand this).

No objections from me, just some thoughts :-)

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).