file/libmagic

[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.

As a practical matter, it's also more maintainable to keep MIME info
with the apps that care about it, especially if the way to recognize a
file format may evolve/change.

Havoc