Sid, On Monday 29 November 2004 18:52, Sid Boyce wrote:
Randall R Schulz wrote:
Sid,
On Monday 29 November 2004 16:17, Sid Boyce wrote:
...
As we've ranted about for many years now, it's almost impossible to download rpm's from some sites when SHIFT-Right click doesn't get you the file you want, ...
The real problem with such sites is that they don't supply proper MIME types in the stream that's returned. Either that or a brain-damaged browser. Any decent browser resorts to using the file name extension (if any) as a data type indicator only when the server does not identify the type of data being returned.
It's really sad that one of the best features of the original Macintosh operating system, typed files, was dropped with the advent of OS-X. What should have happened is that proper file type metadata should have displaced the ridiculous notion of encoding a file's type in its name. It was just a replay of Betamax vs. VHS competition, really.
Sid Boyce
Randall Schulz
That makes sense, it seems there are holes everywhere, e.g in konqueror if you rename a .jpg file to .txt, it treats it as a text file, our friend in Teheran pointed that one out. Laziness perhaps on the part of the developers.
That's not the same thing. The HTTP protocol includes a provision for a MIME type. But under a stock Unix or Linux system, a file is just a sequence of bytes without any information to indicate what's stored therein. The MIME type that may have been returned by a Web server is not retained anywhwere after the transfer is complete. That MIME type is used only to determine the (default) dispensation for the data stream returned by that server. Short of the extension, the only thing some Unix application software can do to determine a file's type is invoke a program such as "file" to identify the file's contents. Either that, or the operating must keep a explicit record of the file's content type (as the pre-OS-X MacOS did). So basically, by changing the file's extension, you've lied to the software about what the file contains.
I've just tried downloading rpms from fedora and SuSE using konqueror and firefox, no problems.
Regards
Sid. -- Sid Boyce
Randall Schulz