Am Mittwoch, dem 03.09.2025 um 22:12 +0900 schrieb Charles Plessy: > Hi all, [..] > A bunch of chemical media types are problematic because they declare > file extensions that are taken by other media types, and many software > parsing `/etc/mime.types` have difficulty to handle this. One way they > solve the problem, for instance, is to ignore some or all chemical media > types. The probelm you describe is not specific to chemical MIME types. It is the limitation of how /etc/mime.types works: by assigning a MIME type to a file suffix, a system that was invented multiple decades ago when there were only a few MIME types. Modern solutions like file or shared-mime-info look into files to determine the file-type or MIME type, and only use the suffix as a hint. > It is my goal to progresively make `/etc/mime.types` closer and closer > to the data available at https://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml, > including by registering missing types (https://www.iana.org/form/media-types) > and by removing legacy extra types that lost relevance. > > If the chemical top-level media type is still relevant, maybe some > people on this list would like to register it to the IANA? The file-types are still relevant and are still used. Nothing has changed in that regard. And if chemical/* gets registered or the MIME types assigned to application/*, it won't solve your problem. > A recent RFC > was written about how to do such registration, and it mentions awareness > of the type (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9694.html). The mentioning of the x-scheme-handler top-type is interesting. I have seen the usage of x- for sub-types in various places. I wasn't sure, though, if that is actually allowed for a top-category as well. > If the chemical media type is not relevant anymore, I would like to > remove it. The question is IMO which applications use /etc/mime.types. Apache is one of them, correct? Some mail programs use it as well, IIRC. Most desktop programs, though, rely on shared-mime-info and wouldn't be affected. IMHO it would be more important to determine, how users that need those MIME types in /etc/mime.types get it there. Having a system that would allow users to e.g. install chemical-mime-info and having that package drop the additional definitions so /etc/mime.types picks them up, would solve your issue. Then users that really need them, can install them and have to care about the clashes. Other users would not be affected. My 2 cents. Regards, Daniel
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