Re: Magic is useless!

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Raphael Bosshard <whistler x-files ch> writes: 
> There is currently a thread running in the reiserfs-maillist about
> "replacing" file-magic with an additional file-attribut called
> "File-Type", containing the Mime-Type of the file.

It really doesn't do us any good - GNOME has to work on many flavors
of UNIX, not just Linux, and with NFS/ext3/etc. not just Reiser.
 
> I ask for the support of the gnome-team for this case. Also support from
> the other filesystem-teams is needed.

It should be easy enough to have the GNOME file type identifier
functions check filesystem metadata before checking magic/extensions, 
so we can use the feature when it's there, but we aren't going to be
able to rely on having the feature.

File magic is perfectly reliable as long as file formats support it...

Havoc