Re: UTI in Lion
Re: UTI in Lion
- Subject: Re: UTI in Lion
- From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:11:06 -0700
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.
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