As this thread was (I think) started with the question, what do we think of removing libmagic, here's my personal answer: I haven't used the --magic option except to test it this week; so if that's the only thing libmagic is used for, I wouldn't miss it. But I agree with these things said before, and they comprise my opinion of how to handle libmagic now: - Nothing should be removed without a good warning; that's what's been called a POLA violation in the Unix community. (POLA = Path Of Least Astonishment) - There should be a good, substantive (not simply philosophical) reason to remove it. Sounds like ffmpeg met that one, but libmagic seems not to. If no such reason is found, a philosophical one should only be given weight after a long period during which users are notified of possible impending removal. For this, I suggest a deprecation warning on the --magic flag. There is of course precedent in SoX for this approach. - If both of those points are not met, I believe libmagic should stay put. On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:14:26AM -0500, Colin Sheaff wrote: While in principle I agree with Jan because it is closer to the 'Unix Philosophy (TM)' of 'do one thing and do it well', I would say there's an equally strong counter-argument that SoX is popular enough to be a tool used by people who know very little of the command line, and removing this feature puts a further burden on them to learn the command line. That might be a good thing for them in an 'eat your vegetables' kind of way, but it's not something SoX needs to care about ideologically. Further, taken to it's logical conclusion, the Unix Philosophy would argue that SoX is already a bit of an abomination in how much it does. If it does sound processing, it should do only that accept a single audio format, and a separate tool should be used for conversion. SoX bills itself as a 'Swiss Army knife' which is already not Unix-y, so by that metric keeping 'libmagic' seems reasonable. That said, I've never used the feature, and wouldn't miss it, so deprecation and eventual removal would be fine with me. -- Doug Lee dgl@xxxxxxxx http://www.dlee.org SSB BART Group doug.lee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.ssbbartgroup.com "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' ('I found it!') but rather 'hmm.... that's funny...'" -- Isaac Asimov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Sox-users mailing list Sox-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sox-users
