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The Debian MIME support sub-policy
Chapter 2 - 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.

2.1 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.

2.2 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 update-mime(8). 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

The Debian MIME support sub-policy