From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 28 20: 7: 9 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mail-out1.apple.com (mail-out1.apple.com [17.254.0.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7757914C9C for ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:07:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from wsanchez@scv4.apple.com) Received: from mailgate2.apple.com ([17.129.100.225]) by mail-out1.apple.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id UAA56214 for ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:02:47 -0700 Received: from scv4.apple.com (scv4.apple.com) by mailgate2.apple.com (mailgate2.apple.com- SMTPRS 2.0.15) with ESMTP id ; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:02:41 -0700 Received: from joliet-jake (joliet-jake.apple.com [17.202.40.140]) by scv4.apple.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id UAA62176; Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:01:09 -0700 Message-Id: <199904290301.UAA62176@scv4.apple.com> To: Wes Peters Subject: Re: Adding desktop support (please don't) Cc: Thomas David Rivers , darrylo@sr.hp.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Date: Wed, 28 Apr 1999 20:02:37 -0700 From: Wilfredo Sanchez Reply-To: wsanchez@apple.com X-Mailer-Extensions: SWSignature 1.2 X-Mailer: by Apple MailViewer (2.106) Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG | This entire discussion seems to have skipped over an important concept: | is the icon an attribute of the executable, or an attribute of the | file manager? This is a point that is often missed, especially by the | microserfs in Redmond. I think the icons are more an attribute of the | file manager, they are a virtual view of the file rather than an | attribute of the file. Um, no. This is how you end up with that stupid thing Windows 3 did with the PIF thingies or whatever they're called, where what you see in the viewer really has nothing to do with what is on the disk. You get all sorts of goofy problems that way. The icon representation you get in the file viewer (and in other tools, hopefully) is a property of the file and belongs bundled (somehow) with the file. You can do the icon-by-file-extention trick, but that doesn't get you very far, in particular with files like executables, where you don't usually add an extention, unless you want the same icon for all files and rename everything cp.exe, etc. :-) The icon represents the file, not the viewer's notion of the file. The file manager knows nothing of some file I may drop in tomorrow. How could that file's icon be a property of the file manager? It's supposed to know ahead of time about all files and file types on the disk? That's pretty tough to deliver. -Fred -- Wilfredo Sanchez, wsanchez@apple.com Apple Computer, Inc., Core Operating Systems / BSD 1 Infinite Loop, 302-4K, Cupertino, CA 95014 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message