Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>>> I think it's a good idea.  It may require some non-trivial changes on
>>> the Lisp side, since libmagic's information is not quite the same as
>>> what Emacs currently uses: we'll probably want to use libmagic to get
>>> a MIME-type and then have a table mapping mime-types to major modes or
>>> some such.
>
>> I attach an early draft filemagic patch.
>
>> Some notes:
>
>> - The mime type info usualy is less granular than the free
>> text info:
>
> We can provide both.  I think we'd want 2 functions: one to get the free
> text info, which just returns a string (or nil), and another to get the
> MIME info, which returns a cons, whose car is a symbol such as
> application/octet-stream, and whose cdr is an alist representing
> the additional optional info.
>
>> file --mime /tmp/tst.xcf
>> /tmp/tst.xcf: application/octet-stream; charset=binary
>
> This would look like (application/octet-stream (charset . "binary"))
>
> A few more comments:
> - please follow the GNU coding convention.  I.e. put spaces where
>   they need to be (e.g. around parens and operators).
> - don't bother with a new file.  Just put it into fileio.c.
> - as someone else mentioned, CPP macros in the Makefile.in are things
>   we'd like to get rid of, so please don't put more of them there.
>   Use autoconf's m4 macros instead, thank you.
>
>
>         Stefan

Find attached a new slightly improved patch according to the suggestions
of the list.

However, I see now I didnt properly read your text above, the
function I wrote now returns a list with 3 elements, (MIME_TYPE
MIME_ENCODING DESCRIPTION). Do we still need 2 functions as you write
above?