iain <iain@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Which is more common > a) Files which are badly named? > b) Files which are funny and nautilus sniffs the wrong thing? I can't really say which is more common and happens more often (I haven't counted), however b) is the one thing that is extremly annoying and that I noticed much more. The reason for this is that a) is the case of a users error and trivially fixed, most programms can even simply avoid this to happen at all by forcing a correct suffix. b) however is the result of the user doing nothing wrong but the computer going goofy and leaving the user with no way to fix this, basically rendering the filemanager unusable for some types of files. >From my experience with Nautilus so far I had a whole bunch of files that where incorrectly handled due to automatic file type guessing, but which could be trivially correctly detected by file suffix. On the other side the number of files that could not be detected by filename and which required a file-type guessing by content was pretty damn small. When one uses the whole filename instead of just the suffix the number should get even smaller, ie COPYING, .bashrc, AUTHORS, etc. don't have a suffix, but its still pretty clear what the content is, no need to play the guessing game. In my opinion file type guessing by content should either not be used at all or only as a very last fallback when everything else failed. Filetype guessing might also become part of the context-menu to allow the user to easily fix the suffix in case of that being broken. So far I really hadn't I single case where I was happy to have file-content guessing in Nautilus/gnome-vfs, but a whole number of cases where it was simply just damn annoying. In my eyes it has done far worse than good. The biggest disadvantage of file-content guessing is after all that it is not modifiable by the user at all, obscure and slow. Using the filename name however is fast, transparent to the user, easy to modify and basically works much better in my experience. -- WWW: http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/ JabberID: grumbel@xxxxxxxxxx ICQ: 59461927 _______________________________________________ gnome-list mailing list gnome-list@xxxxxxxxx http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
