Re: UTI in Lion
Re: UTI in Lion
- Subject: Re: UTI in Lion
- From: Charles Srstka <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2011 20:40:26 -0500
On Sep 22, 2011, at 8:11 PM, Quincey Morris wrote:
> 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.
Depends on whose perspective you’re looking at it from. If you look at it from Apple’s point of view, it completely frees them from being locked in to any one particular type system.
>> 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.
Not if you cached that information in the Spotlight store, being that Spotlight needs to get read access to the file to index it anyway.
Charles_______________________________________________
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