#4555 NORM Never A: MIME types introduce inconsistency

[Zarro Boogs per Child]

#4555: MIME types introduce inconsistency
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  Reporter:  AlbertCahalan  |       Owner:  jg            
      Type:  defect         |      Status:  new           
  Priority:  normal         |   Milestone:  Never Assigned
 Component:  distro         |     Version:                
Resolution:                 |    Keywords:                
  Verified:  0              |  
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Changes (by tomeu):

 * cc: tomeu (added)


Comment:

 Note that we are talking here about an use case that I don't think will be
 very common in the field. Few files that came into the xo from non-xo
 systems will be later distributed to non-xo systems.

 But anyway, I think that what you say makes sense. I'm only concerned
 about activities that set both mime type and extension and do so
 inconsistently. As we want as much people creating activities as possible,
 we want to make it difficult for them to shoot themselves in the foot.

 I'm thinking here about an activity that can open .odt files, so it could
 open entries created from Write. Those entries will have as metadata the
 mime type for ODT and the .odt extension.

 Although that "home made" activity can read .odt, it only writes .txt or
 something else. What if it correctly sets the text/plain or application/x
 -recipe-writer mime type but forgets to update the extension? The result
 of that will be a non-odt file with the .odt extension in the usb stick.

 Note that we prefer to keep using mime types because it's easier for
 activity authors to tag their custom-format files without clashing with
 other activity formats. Those clashes happen with extensions in Windows or
 Unix and also happened with the four-letter file type in classic MacOS.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://dev.laptop.org/ticket/4555#comment:3>
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