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BYTESTREAM module validation deactivation

Open david-russo opened this issue 5 years ago • 1 comments

Dev Effort

2D

Description

The current BYTESTREAM module reads the entirety of any file passed to it and declares it as well-formed, regardless of the file's contents. While possibly serving as a minimal reference implementation of a JHOVE module, and allowing checksum generation for any file, it seems to have no practical use as a validator.

When coupled with its current role in the problems around JHOVE's module selection (#395), it can lead to a lot of time being wasted slowly reading large files that don't validate with other modules, and can even hide truly malformed files behind an unhelpful BYTESTREAM report of "Well-Formed". Even in the case where there aren't any applicable modules for a given format, I think a report of "No applicable modules loaded" would be more helpful than a BYTESTREAM report, in that it would highlight a potential issue the user might want to address.

I suggest we remove it from the default set of modules used for validation to avoid further wasted time and potentially misleading reports, both of which we've found to be common stumbling blocks for new (and occasionally old) JHOVE users inside the Library. It could still be useful for checksum generation though.

david-russo avatar Mar 01 '19 18:03 david-russo