mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1249858@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since none of the standard PHP built-in's is acceptable at the moment
for properly identifying a file's mimetype, I suggest we use Moodle's
code for it. Moodle has a couple of functions in lib/filelib.php for
identifying mime types based on file extension:

get_mimetypes_array():
https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/master/lib/filelib.php#L1387

mimeinfo():
https://github.com/moodle/moodle/blob/master/lib/filelib.php#L1594

The get_mimetypes_array() method has a pretty exhaustive list of
mimetypes. The downside to this is that it's an external library, so
we'll have to check periodically to keep it up to date. It would
probably be best if this is just a temporary measure until the problems
with PHP's mimetype functions get resolved.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1249858

Title:
  Mahara can't figure out mime types because of a finfo() bug

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  There have been several notable Mahara bugs based around the fact that
  our current handling of mimetypes is broken.

  See for instance:
   - https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1220639
   - https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/1249166

  The problem is this:

  1. You can't really trust the mimetype that the browser sends to you, because different browsers send different wacky things
  2. Mahara has long used its own function file_mime_type() in lib/file.php for this purpose
  3. file_mime_type() preferentially uses finfo() to check the mimetype. But, there's a bug in finfo() with an external magic db, which is how it is distributed on Ubuntu presently: https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=61940
  4. file_mime_type() falls back to mime_content_type(). But that's now deprecated
  5. If neither of those works, we fall back to trusting what the browser told us, which isn't really the best (see #1)

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