Re: Fwd: PSPP Testing

[John Darrington]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 09:46:40PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     Jeremy Lavergne <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > It sounds like the open dialog is the only place were bugs have arisen: 
what
     > information can I get you to help in that area?
     
     [...]
     
     >       ??? Problem with filtering on "Open.." window.  Not
     >       identifying ".sav" or ".sps" files, though it finds them
     >       fine when you request "All Files"
     
     (I've seen a similar report from a Windows user, too.)
     
     John, it looks like before commit 34bfbdd99ac80a8 (Filter file
     choosers by mimetype instead of file name), which was first
     released in 0.7.8, we selected files for the Open dialog on the
     basis of extension.  Following that commit, though, we select
     files only on the basis of mime type.  Would it be wise to allow
     either kind of criterion for filtering files?

There are a lot of programs (especially games) which save files with a .sav 
extension.  See http://filext.com/file-extension/SAV
SPSS comes quite low in that list.  Would you really want to deal with 
bug reports that pspp gives funny error messages when trying to open
a "http://filext.com/file-extension/SAV"; ?
     
     The commit doesn't mention a rationale for the change, and I
     don't remember either.

The rationale is that the characters of a filename which follow 
the "." (if any) are not a reliable indicator of the contents of the file.
Operating systems which conform to the freedesktop standards examine the
contents of the file, in order to determine the mimetype.  Others have 
heuristic methods which produce varying results.
Harry had problems with his windows build, because he hadn't configured
the mime association.  But he fixed that.


J'

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