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      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.
      4 
      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!)
      7 
      8 ---
      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.
     17 ---
     18 Read the kerberos magic entry for more ideas.
     19 ---
     20 Write a string merger to make magic entry sizes dynamic.
     21 Strings will be converted to offsets from the string table.
     22 ---
     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 :-(
     26 
     27 0	group	2	# require 2 matches
     28 # rule 1
     29 >0	....
     30 ...
     31 # rule 2
     32 >0	....
     33 ...
     34 ---
     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
     38   is seekable).
     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.
     48 
     49 christos
     50