On 24 February 2018 at 07:39, Kip Warner <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey list, > > Unless I'm misunderstanding things, it seems to me as though typical > GNU typical distros seem to ship two different systems for determining > a file's magic.
The file(1) commands predates not just Linux by about 20 years, but the whole of freedesktp.org, including the shared-mime database, by about 30 years. From a portability perspective, file(1) is probably the best option if you find yourself stranded in the past, or on Unix-like systems like macOS. I think it'd be kind of unreasonable to make file(1) depend on the shared-mime database, considering the tool's history and the fact that the people that tend to use exclusively file(1) are a fairly conservative bunch. Nevertheless, you could ask the author to detect if the shared-mime database is installed, and use that instead of the magic numbers database: http://www.darwinsys.com/file/ Ideally, though, you should ignore file(1) and magic(5) altogether on Linux, if you are dealing with MIME types. > If the second mechanism is intended to superannuate the > first, would it not make sense to provide an fd.o replacement for > file(1) which queries the system's shared-mime-info database instead? I > would think this should be trivial to implement. Considering that every single xdg-util utility is a shell script that calls existing binaries, you can very likely write an "xdg-content-type" that calls things like `gio info -a standard::content-type` on a file under GNOME, or any other utility under other environments, and propose it for inclusion in the xdg-util suite: https://cgit.freedesktop.org/xdg/xdg-utils Ciao, Emmanuele. -- https://www.bassi.io [@] ebassi [@gmail.com] _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] https://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
