%versiondata; ]> The Debian MIME support sub-policy J.H.M. Dassen (Ray) jdassen@debian.org The Debian Policy mailing List debian-policy@lists.debian.org version &version;, &date; This manual describes the policy requirements for the MIME support system used in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This document is part of the policy package for Debian. The policy package itself is maintained by a group of maintainers that have no editorial powers. At the moment, the list of maintainers is:

Julian Gilbey J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk

Manoj Srivastava srivasta@debian.org

 Copyright ©1999 .

This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version.

This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution or on the World Wide Web at . You can also obtain it by writing to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

About this document

The latest copy of this document can be found on ftp.debian.org at /debian/doc/package-developer/mime_policy.txt.gz

MIME support mechanism

If you need assistance implementing this sub-policy, please please ask for it on the debian-devel mailing list. If you have proposals for changes or additions to this sub-policy, please bring it up on debian-policy.

Background

MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, RFC 1521) is a mechanism for encoding files and datastreams and providing meta-information about them, in particular their type (e.g. audio or video) and format (e.g. PNG, HTML, MP3).

Registration of MIME type handlers allows programs like mail user agents and web browsers to to invoke these handlers to view, edit or display MIME types they don't support directly.

MIME support implementation

The mime-support package provides the update-mime program which allows packages to register programs that can show, compose, edit or print MIME types.

Packages containing such programs must register them with update-mime as documented in . They should not depend on, recommend, or suggest mime-support. Instead, they should just put something like the following in the postinst and postrm scripts: if [ -x /usr/sbin/update-mime ]; then update-mime fi