[File] Questioning the future for the apple creator code support

[Christoph Biedl]

Hi there,

a while ago I figured "file --apple" stumbles over special files:

    dev:      ERROR: (null)
    fifo:     ERROR: (null)
    link:     ERROR: (null)
    nullfile: ERROR: (null)

A first attempt to fix this failed, perhaps src/fsmagic.c was the
wrong place for this.

But while patching around I started asking myself: Is it really worth
the efforts?

Let's face it: The file type and creator code is a thing of the past
and the concept has been superseeded by mime types. Also, currently
just 21 different strings are printed by libmagic - in comparison that
number for mime is 468, and counting.

Also, carefully speaking, it seems this feature is not quite used a
lot: After a scan of all the sources in the Debian project I found not
a single usage of the --apple command line option (reproducers beware,
false positives), and all appearences of the MAGIC_APPLE constant are
just code copies.

So my suggestion: Let's slowly fade out that feature. Mark it as
deprecated from the next release on and announce removal for, say,
end of 2021.

Cheers,

    Christoph