That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since it is essentially a fallback format if nothing better matches. What do the magic lines try to match ?
That was added in the very first version of freedesktop.org.xml.in, no idea what it's trying to match either...
I see where this comes from. The original "magic" file from file(1) says: 0 short 0x1f1f old packed data # XXX - why *two* entries for "compacted data", one of which is # byte-order independent, and one of which is byte-order dependent? # 0 short 0x1fff compacted data # This string is valid for SunOS (BE) and a matching "short" is listed # in the Ultrix (LE) magic file. 0 string \377\037 compacted data 0 short 0145405 huf output And when this was converted to use mimetypes, for use in KDE-1, the descriptions were replaced with mimetypes, and for those there was no mimetype, so application/octet-stream was used. And then the magic file from KDE was used to generate parts of the shared-mimetype xml ;) Of course on hindsight having magic for octet-stream makes no sense, since it's the fallback in any case. I think the magic should just be removed, I see no usefulness in such generic magic (there could be any actual mimetype using compacted data internally).
2006-07-09 Bastien Nocera <hadess@hadess.net> * freedesktop.org.xml.in: remove the magic for application/octet-stream, it's silly (Closes: #4843)
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