On Wed, 2003-12-24 at 08:07, Fabio Gomes wrote: > It finally happened. Today I was creating a project. I was using > Nautilus to create the folders. I created a 'doc' folder where I started > to write some text files explaining the project. It is a simple backup > script. One of the text files I wrote was an example of a backup job > descriptor. The file name was example.txt. The first line of the file > had a <heade> rtag. After I closed vim, Nautilus ASSUMED that it was an > HTML file, so it PREVENTED me from opening the f@%(#$*%ing file from the > "incredibly high-quality GNOME UI". The only options were Mozilla and > OpenOffice. This prevented me from working for several minutes while I > tried to figure out how to open that damn file without going to the > console. > > No way. I finally quit. I decided to open a xterm. Not to edit my file > and make it look less like HTML, but to GET RID of the most stupid > feature ever implemented in a file manager. I moved > /etc/gnome-vfs-mime-magic to somewhere else and restarted Nautilus. > > Now the damn file manager sees that the .txt file is really a text file > (what a great guess! :-)) and allows me to open vim to edit it. Great. > > The only drawback I noticed is that Nautilus does not know how to handle > .desktop files anymore, even though it recognizes the file type as I can > see in the properties dialog. Weird. > > Well. This happened to me, an experienced GNOME user. But now stop and > imagine this kind of thing happening in a company with 100+ machines > runinng GNOME while dozens of people work with Nautilus to create some > project... > > I am thinking seriously about stopping some personal projects in favor > of creating a patch for nautilus+gnome-vfs to completely disable the > unrequested opening of files and distribute it among GNOME users. This > seems to be the only way to convince Nautilus and gnome-vfs maintainers > to (at least give an option to) disable this thing and make nautilus > finally work properly and with decent performance. > > File type determination by content is crap. It's a misfeature. It is > completely unnecessary. Its benefits do not compensate its drawbacks: > > - The information generated by it is proven to not be accurate enough to > be used by a program do determine its actions (the above example and > the dozens of related bugs in bugzilla are sufficient). This data > should be used merely for informational purposes to the user in the > Properties dialog, for example. > > - It reduces performance of Nautilus to a dead turtle: > > - In addition of simply opendir/readdir/closedir ONCE, > nautilus+vfs does open/read/close on EVERY > file in a directory. > > - A directory with 250 files (1MB each) is sufficient to > make nautilus spend 20 seconds on a Duron 950MHz with > a 40GB ATA133 hard disk and 256 MB of memory. > > - The same directory takes less than 50 miliseconds to > be loaded in Windows Explorer and xfe[1] (also same > machine) > > - Nautilus spends 40x more time to load the directory > than Windows Explorer and xfe[1] > > - This is obviously the main performance bottleneck of > Nautilus. > > - The item above implies on unnecessary evil disk activity > (seeking, etc) that reduces the life time of the hardware. > > - The bugs generated by this feature are endless. If you search > bugzilla.gnome.org for gnome-vfs bugs related to mime-type mapping, > you will see historic examples of: > - .mp3 seen as .zip > - .1st, .sys, .swf, .ogg, and .ico seen as MP3 > - .java and .css seen as C/C++ > - .php and .xml seen as HTML > - There are DOZENS of bugs like these. > - There will never be a definitive fix for this kind of bug. > > GNOME needs to cut its own body to get rid of these stupid useless > unneeded features that only mess with people's work instead of helping > them. > > The maintainers argue that it is a useful/needed/killer/great feature, > but Nautilus was never released without it to allow people (even > themselves) decide if the feature is useful/needed or not. > > If type determination by content was good, we would see it in lots of > file managers in the world, since it is so trivial to implement. But no. > The only file manager that implement such a feature is > Nautilus+GnomeVFS. > > The type determination by content should be available in a context > menu/menu item such as "Discover file type" that, when the user clicks > on it, it discovers the type of the file and asks the user if he/she > wants to fix the file extension/suffix to match the discovered file > type. > > And you? Do you USER have an opinion about this subject? Thank you. I've been having similar problems with Nautilus but I thought it was something I was doing wrong. I've spent hours searching help files and how-tos trying to discover *what* I was doing wrong. I even posted a couple of questions to this list. (I never got an answer.) It's good to know that what I thought was my problem is actually a bug. My opinion? Yes, the bug should be fixed. Quickly. Don Henson _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
