Re: using libmagic in Emacs?

[Juri Linkov]

>> > PLEASE do not base Emacs infrastructure on external programs, unless
>> > they come with Emacs.
>>
>> There are many features in Emacs that depend on external programs,
>> e.g. `ls' for dired, `find' and `grep', `man', `ispell', `shell',
>> `gdb', `diff', VCS tools, etc.
>
> I said infrastructure, not features.  Of those you mentioned only `ls'
> is used in infrastructure, and that's precisely why we had to write
> ls-lisp.el.

`mailcap-file-default-commands' is not infrastructure.  It's one
small feature.

>> My patch fails gracefully when `file' is not available, I tried
>> removing `file' without any problem.  The function just returns nil.
>
> And that is graceful how?

When it returns nil, then default commands are the same as provided
by mailcap for plain text files, i.e. `less', `konqueror', etc.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/