Re: MIME support in Debian.
Am Samstag, den 22.12.2007, 23:34 +0900 schrieb Charles Plessy:
> The Debian mime policy requires packages register through update-mime,
> which according to its manpage uses /etc/mailcap and
> /usr/lib/mime/packages. However, I noticed the /usr/share/mime and
> /usr/share/mime-info directories that also seem to contain relevant
> informations.
You missed /usr/share/mimelnk :)
/usr/share/mime : freedesktop.org shared MIME info database
/usr/share/mime-info : GNOME MIME data (IMHO mostly obsolete)
/usr/share/mimelnk : KDE 3
Current GNOME and the upcoming KDE 4 both uses the shared-mime-info
database in /usr/share/mime.
Old KDE3 and GNOME systems are not well described, but the link
collection in my next paragraph contains a few information links for
these systems too.
> Is there a documentation somewhere that explains what is necesary and
> sufficient to be done so that a Debian package provides MIME support
> that "just works" ?
Hm, I'm not aware of some Debian specific documentation. However, I
collect such information for a project. Look at
http://sourceforge.net/docman/?group_id=159685
> Basically the goal is that the relevant program will
> be used by mail readers and web browsers.
IMHO you should only try to support the mailcap/metamail and the fd.o
shared-mime-info systems.
> Also, if there are two such
> programs installed, is there something that can be done through MIME so
> that the user has a chance to chose the program ?
Not directly through MIME (the MIME RFCs just describe the so called
Internet Content type, e.g. "text/plain" - association with programs is
AFAIK not part of the MIME standard). This has been described in the
fd.o standard:
http://standards.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/latest/ar01s07.html
> Or will it be a "last
> installed is the default" situation, like with the alternative system ?
You could check yourself: Take a ook
at /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache and check, if maybe the first
mentioned application for a MIME type s used. I'm not sure.
The old GNOME system IIRC had some special way (special keys) to handle
this via .keys files. But the docs are not verbose about this.
Regards, Daniel
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