Re: Bug#589991: mime-support: MIME types needed for x-gzip and x-compress

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

Hi Brian,

On Friday 03 September 2010, Brian White wrote:
> I'm being petitioned quite strongly to re-add types for gzipped
> files to the /etc/mime.types file.  I originally removed those
> types from that file because they caused Apache to work
> incorrectly, namely that Apache would then send a foo.html.gz file
> as type=application/x-gzip instead of
> type=text/html;encoding=gzip.
> 
> If I were to add these types back, what havoc might that wreak on
> current and previous releases of Apache?

nowadays (since 2.2.15 IIRC) it's possible in Apache to disable 
specific types that come from /etc/mime.types. Therefore it is always 
possible to fix any breakage by changing Apache's configuration. The 
current default configuration already sets type=application/x-gzip. I 
just would have to change the comments in the config file on how to 
change that to content-encoding gzip. Therefore from an Apache point 
of view, there is no problem with this change. But I don't know how 
other web servers like lighttpd and nginx handle this.

In any case, I ask you to wait with a possible change until squeeze is 
released. It may cause subtle breakage in many places. And having 
different configurations in testing and unstable will make it harder 
to debug problems, and for no good reason.

Cheers,
Stefan