On Sep 22, 2011, at 17:24 , Charles Srstka wrote: > Sure there can be a “new or enhanced” UTI system, as long as its (rather > simple) interfaces continue to work with current applications. Since the > behind-the-scenes of how the UTI system detects what types of files is > abstracted away, it can be changed at any time with no ill effects.
Sorry, I expressed myself badly. I was just suggesting that the abstraction isn't *driving* any desire to adopt UTIs. At best it's a small side benefit. > Not necessarily. The lesson learned from that situation was that Apple can’t > go out and solve this kind of problem all on its own. If they go out and work > together with the other vendors, the situation could change. If I’m correctly > informed, WinFS was going to be capable of storing file types, and assuming > Microsoft ever does get something like this working, Apple and MS could work > out a cross-platform standard. By all means, let's have a cross-platform standard. Let's do whatever it takes, let's bribe politicians, let's have a Million Nerd March from Redmond to Cupertino and then to planet Xanadu (or wherever the centroid of Unix development is these days). But this would take years, probably a generation, especially when you factor in the time for widespread adoption of a new standard. I'm not saying don't do it, I just don't agree with characterizing the situation as "we're practically there, we just have a few cross-platform mechanisms to implement". Still, I was wrong before. We *already* have a compatible cross-platform metadata store -- extensions. The problem isn't that we don't have the cross-platform technology. The problem is that that it's really, really bad as a mechanism for storing what you call file types. > Even assuming the status quo of flat files + extensions stays forever, > though, there are still things you can do with UTIs. The most obvious is to > analyze the file’s contents to determine what type of file it is. There are > plenty of file types out there that can be identified by examining the first > few bytes of the file — it would not be very difficult to augment the UTI > system to take those into account when determining the type of a file, and as > SSDs become more prevalent, the performance penalty for doing so will > decrease significantly. IOW, the first 4 bytes of a file are, in many cases, file-type pseudo-metadata. That would only be helpful if there were a reliable way of knowing whether this information was present, but there isn't. It seem to me that guessing just makes a bigger mess. I also think that requiring a file to be opened (and read) in order to obtain metadata is going to suffer some serious technical pushback. You couldn't, for example, determine the type of a file that was exclusively opened by a different process. Etc. _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
