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8 Debian GNU/Linux Menu Sub-Policy Manual.
11 released under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version
12 2 or (at your option) any later.
14 The debian-policy mailing list has taken responsibility for the
15 contents of this document, with the package maintainers responsible
16 for packaging adminstrivia only.
22 <title>The Debian MIME support sub-policy</title>
24 <name>J.H.M. Dassen (Ray)</name>
25 <email>jdassen@debian.org</email>
28 <name>The Debian Policy mailing List</name>
29 <email>debian-policy@lists.debian.org</email>
31 <version>version &version;, &date;</version>
34 This manual describes the policy requirements for the MIME support
35 system used in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. This
36 document is part of the policy package for Debian. The policy
37 package itself is maintained by a group of maintainers that
38 have no editorial powers. At the moment, the list of
42 <p>Julian Gilbey <email>J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk</email></p>
45 <p>Manoj Srivastava <email>srivasta@debian.org</email></p>
53 Copyright ©1999 .
56 This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
57 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
58 as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version
59 2, or (at your option) any later version.
63 This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
64 <em>without any warranty</em>; without even the implied
65 warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular
66 purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more
70 A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as
71 <tt>/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL</tt> in the Debian GNU/Linux
72 distribution or on the World Wide Web at
73 <url id="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html"
74 name="The GNU General Public Licence">. You can also obtain it by writing to the
75 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
76 Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
83 <heading>About this document</heading>
85 The latest copy of this document can be found on
86 <ftpsite>ftp.debian.org</ftpsite> at
87 <ftppath>/debian/doc/package-developer/mime_policy.txt.gz</ftppath>
91 <heading>MIME support mechanism</heading>
93 If you need assistance implementing this sub-policy, please
94 please ask for it on the debian-devel mailing list. If you
95 have proposals for changes or additions to this sub-policy,
96 please bring it up on debian-policy.
99 <heading>Background</heading>
101 MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, RFC 1521) is
102 a mechanism for encoding files and datastreams and providing
103 meta-information about them, in particular their type (e.g. audio
104 or video) and format (e.g. PNG, HTML, MP3).
108 Registration of MIME type handlers allows programs like mail
109 user agents and web browsers to to invoke these handlers to
110 view, edit or display MIME types they don't support directly.
116 <heading>MIME support implementation</heading>
118 The <package>mime-support</package> package provides the
119 <prgn>update-mime</prgn> program which allows packages to
120 register programs that can show, compose, edit or print
125 Packages containing such programs must register them
126 with <prgn>update-mime</prgn> as documented in <manref
127 name="update-mime" section="8">. They should <em>not</em> depend
128 on, recommend, or suggest <prgn>mime-support</prgn>. Instead,
129 they should just put something like the following in the
130 <tt>postinst</tt> and <tt>postrm</tt> scripts:
133 if [ -x /usr/sbin/update-mime ]; then