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Re: Improved mime-type guessing (issue #1233)

From: Julian Foad <julianfoad_at_btopenworld.com>
Date: Fri, 01 Aug 2008 10:25:34 +0100

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 22:39 -0700, Hyrum K. Wright wrote:
> While performing a random walk through the issue tracker, I came across issue
> #1233, which includes a patch to use the /etc/mime.types file on *nix systems to
> improve our mime-type guessing. It looked interesting, so I started digging in,
> only to realize that there were more issues at play than at first blush.
>
> Before go too deeply into the code, I have a few questions I was hoping people
> could answer:
>
> * Does this even matter? Would adding this functionality be a benefit to our
> users, and if so, does the overhead of adding and maintaining it outweigh the
> derived benefit?

Theoretically, yes, it matters. It's ugly for a supposedly data-neutral
storage system to contain a set of hard-coded rules about what types of
data it treats in what way.

Practically, I cannot quantify the cost and benefit. It's certain that
there would be a benefit to some people, because we have several times
had requests to add this or that MIME type to the list. Let's see how
much interface code would be required to do this.

> * Is there a better place to do this? APR? Would it be reasonable to move the
> mime-type handling code out of httpd into APR where Subversion could make use
> of it?

What sort of MIME-type handling APIs?

> * Is there equivalent MIME type guessing functionality available on Windows,
> either through an API or via a system file?

Don't know.

> Hopefully the answers to these questions will help us resurrect this patch, or
> decide on a reasonable fate for issue #1233.
>
> -Hyrum
>

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Received on 2008-08-01 11:25:50 CEST

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