[Pythonmac-SIG] suggestion: use Internet Config for file creation types

[Oliver Steele]

I think MacPython (both the IDE and the interpreter) should use Internet
Config, to compute the type and creator of files that they create.  This
would mean that double-clicking on a *.html file produced by a Python script
would open it with Netscape Navigator or IE, depending on how your IC
database is configured -- this is what I always want from scripts I run, and
I imagine it's desirable for most other people and appropriate for most
scripts as well.  It also means that files created by a Python script on a
foreign system and then copied to the Mac with Anarchie, IE, or PC Exchange,
have the same type and creator as files created by running that same script
on a Mac, which I think is a useful and intuitive invariant.

An alternative would be to change each script that creates a file to set the
type and creator, but (1) this distributes the work everywhere, and (2)
ghettoizes the Mac by (2a) making Mac programmers write scripts that are
unnecessarily OS-dependent, and (2b) keeping scripts from other platforms
from working as well on the Mac (as well as Mac-specific scripts, and as
well as those scripts do on platforms such as Windows, which use the file
extension to encode the type and creator).

I probably won't ever implement this (I swore off C some years ago, and I
hope to stay on the wagon), but I'm hoping that if this strikes anyone else
as a good idea, maybe someone will give a go at implementing it.