Abigail: > On Thu, Jul 09, 2009 at 01:41:17PM +0200, Shot (Piotr Szotkowski) wrote:
>> Joshua Juran: >>> [2] Fetishes include extensionless filenames >> Ok, I’ll bite. >> I might’ve used extensionless filenames on my Linux desktop out of >> æsthetic reasons (which you might call fetishes and I’ll be happy about >> it), and I stopped because Nautilus wouldn’t create picture previews >> when the file was extensionless, but why do you actually *need* >> extensions for? >> Surely you can’t do anything serious with a file based solely on its >> extension, and I guess you’d rather my UI would not have to look at the >> header just to choose an icon for a file, *and* the shell completion is >> so much easier to code if it only has to consider extensions – but why >> wouldn’t a filesystem that, say, stores the file type in metadata, work >> better than extensions? > Thinks I often do: > $ grep 'foo bar' *.[ch] > $ display *.jpg > $ rm *.p[ml] > Oh, sure, it *could* all be done based on actual content, but while you're > looking at the first file, I'm already done processing the directory. > Now, go write a useful, non-trivial, Makefile that doesn't use extensions. I agree that it’s sometimes (or even often, in certain areas/scenarios) useful for files sharing certain specifics to have this reflected in their names, and I can even confess that I just did all sorts of $ dcraw -e *.NEF $ mkdir jpg nef $ mmv 'DSC_*.NEF' 'nef/dsc_#1.nef' $ mmv 'DSC_*.thumb.jpg' 'jpg/dsc_#1.jpg' myself, but I still prefer to have ‘The Passionate Programmer’ rather than ‘The Passionate Programmer.pdf’ on my desktop, and I think you’d see my point of view better if you imagined all directories having to sport a .dir suffix on their names to be treated as directories by most applications. I’m not against storing stuff in the filename where it’s useful (although ‘display Honeymoon*’ looks nicer to me than ‘display *.jpg’), I’d just rather not be forced to use the extensions where they’re uglish – hence the idea of the type stored as a quickly-accessible metadata. I just recalled reading somewhere that HFS used something like this, and I just now read [1] and [2] – it seems like something I must’ve read before coming up with the above ideas. I’m still not sure whether my case falls outside of the ‘fetish’ label; all I wanted to say is that I think there *are* legitimate reasons for extensionless filenames. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_code [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Type_Identifier — Shot -- Local Man Plans To Run 3 Weeks’ Worth of Errands During Twitter Maintenance Window [patentlyfalse]
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