file/libmagic

[Thomas Leonard]

On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 02:27:02PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> <quote who="Havoc Pennington">
> 
> > On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 01:04:01PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote: 
> > >   - Why would we distribute magic information with applications, as
> > >     described in the shared-mime-info spec? This seems amazlingly useless,
> > >     given that I want to know what a file is regardless of having an
> > >     application installed to edit/view it.
> > > 
> > >   - Shouldn't we centralise/standardise on the file magic database, and make
> > >     sure all information is added to it, so everyone benefits, and it's
> > >     maintained outside applications?
> > 
> > If I write an application with a new file format, and I ship it, then
> > people using existing/older OS versions need to have that MIME type
> > installed whenever they install the application.
> > 
> > Sure we can also suck these things into the central database, but you
> > can't make applications rely on vendor errata to the MIME database.  The
> > app has to work out-of-box without OS modifications.
> 
> This makes sense, though I would hope that the central database is regarded
> as more important in terms of cooperation and maintenance. That doesn't seem
> to be the case with the shared-mime-info spec.

The people who currently maintain the various existing MIME databases
should ask for CVS access on freedesktop.org so that they can update the
central database (and, perhaps, make new releases).

There should be a list of such people on the site so people know where to
send corrections and additions.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk		tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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