Bug#786889: ITP: media-types -- List of media types associated to file suffixes

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>

  Package name    : media-types
  Version         : 2.1.44
  Upstream Author : Mostly Ville Skyttä <ville.skytta@iki.fi>, for Fedora
  URL             : https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/mailcap.git/tree/mime.types
  License         : Public domain
  Programming Lang: Just a text file
  Description     : List of media types associated to file suffixes

 The IANA [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority] maintains a list of media types
 (see [RFC 6838]) and their detailed descriptions that indicate which file name
 suffixes, if any, are used to signal that a given file is of the given type.
 On Unix systems, the file `/etc/mime.types` summarises this information in a
 plain text tabular format (media types were formerly called MIME types).  
 .
 The IANA does not provide directly a `mime.types`f ile.  To keep it up to
 date, one has to regularly monitor changes on the IANA website.  This is done
 very well by the maintainer of Fedora's `mailcap` package.  This Debian package
 provides Fedora's `/etc/mime.types` in Debian systems. 
 .
  [Internet Assigned Numbers Authority]: https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types
  [RFC 6838]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4855

Further comments:

Currently, /etc/mime.types is provided by the mime-support package, which I
maintain.  This package also provides Debian's implementation of the Mailcap
system (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1524).  However, the /etc/mime.types
files is consumed by other systems, like Apache, and not all computers need to
have the Mailcap system installed.  Moreover, maintaing the /etc/mime.types is
time-consuming (see above), so I plan to track Fedora's file.  Since it lives
in a Git repository it is tempting to base a Debian source package on it, but
this Debian package would only distribute a single file.  Alternatively,
/etc/mime.types could be moved to a different package, for instance base-files,
but this would increase the work load of the package maintainer.

Your comments are welcome.  Please CC this ITP as I am not subscribed to
debian-devel.

Cheers,

Charles

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan