Most TODOs live in the TODO section of doc/file.man (i.e. file(1)).
They are more visible there, so please add any further TODOs to that
file, not here. More speculative material can live here.

(This change was made when Reuben Thomas noticed that all the bugs
listed in the BUGS section of the man page had been fixed!)

---

It would be nice to simplify file considerably. For example,
reimplement the apprentice and non-pattern magic methods in Python,
and compile the magic patterns to a giant regex (or something similar)
so that only a small amount of C is needed (because fast execution is
typically only required for soft magic, not the more detailed
information given by hard-wired routines). In this regard, note that
hplip, which is BSD-licensed, has a magic reimplementation in Python.