> What we're really talking about, I think, is what two names to use for > these three things: > > 1. a zipped dia file > 2. an unzipped dia file > 3. a dia file
Unless of course you've split the world into only the first two cases. It's a matter of how you personally have set up the taxonomy of file types. If you have broken the universe of Dia files into type 1 and 2, then ".gzdia" and ".dia" suffice. > Granted, if I mailed you my (zipped) .dia file and you tried to open it > with "view as text" relying your mime setup, you'd be disappointed. But > we took a few turns to get there: you're relying on my naming convention, > and forcibly interposing yourself between the file and its natural > editor/viewer, Dia. Sometimes I really do want to edit the .dia file in a text editor. Really. You might not believe it, but use it to make a database schema with 30 classes, and you'll start to want to edit the .dia file in a text editor, too. Just one simple case: I want to change every blue class to a green one. Or, I want these 8 classes to all be the exact same shade of purple. When you are faced with eight .dia files, and you wonder which are gzipped (and thus need preprocessing before editing) it would be far less tedious if there were *SOME* indication of which were zipped and which weren't. I guess .dia.gz vs. .gzdia doesn't matter to me much except on a philosophical level where I don't want *ANY* extension at all, much less two of them tacked together. > > It's ugly. I'd actually say given the current mess we're in to create a > > new extension ".gzdia" or whatever, and fix it when filesystems actually > > store MIME types with files. (We'd do away with extensions entirely at > > that time, would we not?) > > I believe that's what Macs call a "resource fork" and it's been around 20 > years. Obviously, that's not long enough to gain adoption in these > parts.... ;-) I was thinking how Mac did indeed make a first stab at this quite some years ago. I remember their solution wasn't without problems, but it was at least going down the right path. Does OS/X still have the concept of holding the file TYPE separately from the file NAME? And what happens if the metadata for file types gets erased or otherwise corrupted? Is the file no longer usable until you get another copy of the file (like it was back in the bad old days)? And why do I reckon BeOS had this down pat? -- Tim Ellis Senior Database Architect author, tedia2sql (tedia2sql.tigris.org) _______________________________________________ Dia-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/faq.html Main page at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia
