file/libmagic

[Jeff Waugh]

<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.

- Jeff

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