[I7] I7 projects and bundle files

[Philip Chimento]

On Dec 29, 2007 6:45 PM, Adam Thornton <adam at fsf.net> wrote:
> However, how tough would it be, to, in addition to letting
> project.inform be a directory, containing Source, Build, and Index
> (and their contents), to also allow it to be any of: a zipfile, a
> tarball, a tarball compressed with bzip2, and a tarball compressed
> with gzip ?  Or, perhaps, *one* of these, chosen for ease of
> manipulation across platforms (probably zip) ?
>
> The file name and extension would still be .inform.  The contents
> would just be whatever is normally in the proj.inform directory.

I could probably do that. I haven't looked yet, but I'm sure there are
plenty of clever libraries that let you read and write zip files in
place transparently. But why not use the extension .inform.zip? I ask
because GTK gives you file selection dialogs that can open either
files, or directories, but not both. I believe it's possible to switch
between the two, so the problem would not be insurmountable, but it
would be complicated. And I think it might be confusing to have one
extension mean any of several types of content. I know that at least
Fedora has some filemagic recognition thing that gives you warnings
like "File X has extension Y, but it appears to be of type Z. It may
be a security risk to open it. Please rename it to the correct
extension" and refuses to open the file, and I don't know how it would
respond to this. On the other hand, we _do_ want to hide as many
computerish details from the user as we can.

What do you suggest for saving files? Always save compressed projects
from now on? Have a checkbox in the file selector saying something
like "Compress project to save space (recommended)"? (ugh,
"recommended") At first I thought the checkbox was the best way to go
so that users of new versions could still do collaborations with users
of old versions. But then again, they could just upgrade. I read that
in good interface design, you shouldn't offer the user a bunch of
options, you should just pick the options they'll need. Anyone who
needs the unzipped files for some reason probably knows how zip works.
-- 
Philip

"How fortunate we are in this country, Mr. Speaker, that the left is more
gauche than sinister."
-- Pierre Elliott Trudeau