Proposal for std.path replacement

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday 06 March 2011 22:09:22 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> "Jonathan M Davis" <jmdavisProg at gmx.com> wrote in message
> news:mailman.2280.1299459971.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 
> > This reminds me. I should look into mime types one of these days to see
> > what the
> > appropriate way (if any) would be to put support for them in Phobos. It
> > would be
> > nice to not have to go by extension for the few programs that I have
> > which have
> > to worry about file type.
> 
> I'm no unix expert, but my understanding is that mime types in the
> filesystem don't even exist at all, and that what it *really* does is use
> some complex black-box-ish algorithm that takes into account the first few
> bytes of the file, the extention, the exec flag, and god-knows-what-else to
> determine what type of file it is. Contrary to how people keep making it
> sound, mime type is *not* the determining factor (and cannot possibly be),
> but rather nothing more than the way the *result* of all that analysis is
> represented.

I thought that the first few bytes of the file _were_ the mime type. Certainly, 
from what I've seen, extension has _no_ effect on most programs. Konqueror 
certainly acts like it does everything by mime type - file associations are set 
that way.

- Jonathan M Davis