Hi, all… In the bake-off on Monday, when we compared file types, Black Duck’s application returned a file type of APPLICATION for quite many file types, while others did not. While at that point we identified this behavior to be a bug, this behavior is actually a consequence of treating the MIME type (application/*) as APPLICATION.
From the spec (Sesction 4.3, g) APPLICATION if the file is associated with a specific application type (MIME type of application/*); This MIME type specification allows for anything of type application/octet-stream to be labeled an application. For example, running… file --mime-type -b ./cpio-2.10/po/id.gmo yields a type of application/octet-stream, even though everyone but us specified the GMO files as other. The language “if the file is associated with a specific application type” is more restrictive than the MIME type. However, I would then question what it means to be “associated”. An Adobe Flash movie has the MIME type “application/vnd.adobe.flash-movie” and may be “associated" with Adobe flash players. Does that mean a flash movie is an application? How about Microsoft Visio files (“application/vnd.visio”, http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/vnd.visio)? I think we need a definition of an application that’s independent of MIME types, or, for that matter, file types. I would propose the following, just to get the ball rolling: 4.3… g) APPLICATION if the file can be executed (natively or with an interpreter) to provide functionality. I mention interpreters, because the execution of an application may well consist of running a bash script or for that matter, a javascript file, and in such cases, we should establish that they should be labeled as such. What do you think?
_______________________________________________ Spdx-tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.spdx.org/mailman/listinfo/spdx-tech
