[Sugar-devel] activities using zip files (was: Re: [IAEP] Journal criticism)

[Sascha Silbe]

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 12:34:03PM -0500, James Simmons wrote:

> 5).  When several Activities support the same MIME type (Zip files are 
> BOUND to be popular) then there needs to be a way of specifying that a 
> particular Journal entry should be resumed by a particular Activity by 
> default.
Actually zip is just a container format and should be handled as such 
(if possible at all). I.e. zips created by activities should use a MIME 
type identifying the _contents_, not the generic application/zip.

File formats can be - and often are - nested: OpenOffice documents are 
xml-inside-zip, some other application might be using 
xml-inside-tar-inside-gz and source tarballs are 
(C+Makefile+...)-inside-tar-inside-bz2. Unfortunately, most software 
using MIME types has very little support for such complexity (only 
gzip/bzip/compress as "encodings"). While it would be nice for the 
Journal to handle the full (i.e. nested) type, we'll need to cope with 
the lack of support in other software (like web servers) for quite some 
time.

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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