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

[Christos Zoulas]

The underlying problem is that the output selection mechanism was added without proper design
so it is spread all over the place and is fragile. This used to work on file-5.30 (I just checked) and broke
somewhere. You are right that apple creator/type code is less than useful these days, but the fact
that's broken now is because the output selection (which is also used for mime) is too intrusive and
complicated. I would fix it again for now, and consider to remove it later.

christos

> On Jul 14, 2019, at 1:28 PM, Christoph Biedl <astron.com.bwoj at manchmal.in-ulm.de> wrote:
> 
> 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
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