[Python-ideas] My objections to implicit package directories

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:20 PM, Phil Vandry <vandry at tzone.org> wrote:
> On 2012-03-26 10:57 , Guido van Rossum wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 1:45 AM, Ronald Oussoren<ronaldoussoren at mac.com>
>>  wrote:
>>>
>>> Yes. On what platform are you? On unixy platforms filename extensions are
>>> just a naming convention that can just as easily be used with directories.
>>
>>
>> IIUC that's how almost all filesystems treat them. However desktop
>> software often assigns specific meanings to them -- the user can
>> configure these, but there's a large set of predefined bindings too,
>> and many key applications also play this game (since there is,
>> frankly, not much else to go by -- some important file types are not
>
>
> On the Mac, at least, there is much more to go by: a 4-character file type
> and a 4-character creator type associated with every file. The IANA
> registration form for MIME types even lets registrants specify the mapping
> between these 8 characters and a MIME type.
>
> However, these do seem to have fallen into disuse in recent versions of
> MacOS. I never knew if this was an intentional downgrade or just a lack of
> upkeep.

Oh, I remember those from hacking MacOS decades ago... I suspect they
have fallen by the wayside because only Mac-specific tools keep track
of these as files are copied, moved, backed up, archived, restored,
uploaded and downloaded, etc.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)