1 Most TODOs live in the TODO section of doc/file.man (i.e. file(1)).
2 They are more visible there, so please add any further TODOs to that
3 file, not here. More speculative material can live here.
5 (This change was made when Reuben Thomas noticed that all the bugs
6 listed in the BUGS section of the man page had been fixed!)
9 It would be nice to simplify file considerably. For example,
10 reimplement the apprentice and non-pattern magic methods in Python,
11 and compile the magic patterns to a giant regex (or something similar;
12 maybe using Ragel (http://www.complang.org/ragel/)) so that only a
13 small amount of C is needed (because fast execution is typically only
14 required for soft magic, not the more detailed information given by
15 hard-wired routines). In this regard, note that hplip, which is
16 BSD-licensed, has a magic reimplementation in Python.
18 Read the kerberos magic entry for more ideas.
20 Write a string merger to make magic entry sizes dynamic.
21 Strings will be converted to offsets from the string table.
23 Programming language support, we can introduce the concept of a group
24 of rules where n rules need to match before the rule is positive. This
25 could require structural changes to the matching code :-(
27 0 group 2 # require 2 matches
35 - Merge the stat code dance in one place and keep it in one place
36 (perhaps struct buffer).
37 - Enable seeking around if offset > nbytes if possible (the fd
39 - We could use file_pipe2file more (for EOF offsets, CDF documents),
40 but that is expensive; perhaps we should provide a way to disable it
41 - The implementation of struct buffer needs re-thinking and more work.
42 For example we don't always pass the fd in the child. This is not
43 important yet as we don't have yet cases where use/indirect magic
44 needs negative offsets.
45 - Really the whole thing just needs here's an (offset, buffer, size)
46 you have (filebuffer, filebuffersize &&|| fd), fill the buffer with
47 data from offset. The buffer API should be changed to just do that.