Bug 465994

While investigating a regression in file --mime behavior (type and encoding are no longer separated with ";", unlike in 4.17), I noticed a behavior that seems somewhat odd to me:

[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-type /etc/passwd
/etc/passwd: text/plain
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-type --mime-encoding /etc/passwd
/etc/passwd: text/plain charset=us-ascii
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-encoding /etc/passwd
/etc/passwd: binary
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ 

Looking at lines 259-278 of ./src/ascmagic.c this is no surprise, yet I think this lacks much sense. Even though charset=us-ascii is not considered encoding, but part of content type, file added it when I specified --mime-encoding option. Contrary what would one expect, --mime-encoding does not output the charset alone, but (correct?) "binary" encoding (which is hardcoded in source code).

[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-type /bin/ls
/bin/ls: application/x-executable
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-type --mime-encoding /bin/ls
/bin/ls: application/x-executable
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ file --mime-encoding /bin/ls
/bin/ls: application/x-executable
[lkundrak@trurl ~]$ 

For non-text (binary) files the situation seems different -- the option does not make any difference, and never seems to yield results which could have been considered correct.

Any thoughts on this?