Hi,

replying to my own message

> I was told that *.mgc files are really just "memory dumps" of tables to
> avoid re-parsing of the associated plain text files at each invocation.
> Are these a problem for a shared /usr/share with both 32bit and 64bit
> machines? I could just go ahead and try it but I think it's better to
> stay theoretical as sometimes there's more than "oh, it obviously works".

I _did_ try it and can say "oh, it obviously _doesn't_ work":

    alpha$ file /bin/*
    /bin/[:          file: invalid type 0 in mconvert().

Clearly, this is faulty. I worked around the problem by moving the *.mgc 
files out of place.

    alpha$ file /bin/*
    file: Using regular magic file `/usr/share/misc/magic'
    /bin/[:          ELF 64-bit LSB executable, Alpha (unofficial), [...]
    [...]

I expected the parsing to take extraordinarily long but it was bearable 
given the usual feeling of an AXPpci33 21066/166 with nfs-root over 10Mb/s.

Now I'm struggling as to what is the "cleaner" approach: a) move such 
arch-dependent files out of the arch-independent tree b) don't use them 
at all and trade speed for interoperability/disk space.

What's a clean solution to this?

Thanks and regards,

Nino