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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>Michael Alan Dorman <email>mdorman@debian.org</email></p>
45 <p>Richard Braakman <email>dark@xs4all.nl</email></p>
48 <p>Philip Hands <email>phil@hands.com</email></p>
51 <p>Manoj Srivastava <email>srivasta@debian.org</email></p>
59 Copyright ©1999 .
62 This manual is free software; you may redistribute it and/or
63 modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
64 as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version
65 2, or (at your option) any later version.
69 This is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
70 <em>without any warranty</em>; without even the implied
71 warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular
72 purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more
76 A copy of the GNU General Public License is available as
77 <tt>/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL</tt> in the Debian GNU/Linux
78 distribution or on the World Wide Web at
79 <url id="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html"
80 name="The GNU Public Licence">. You can also obtain it by writing to the
81 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330,
82 Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.
89 <heading>About this document</heading>
91 The latest copy of this document can be found on
92 <ftpsite>ftp.debian.org</ftpsite> at
93 <ftppath>/debian/doc/package-developer/mime_policy.txt</ftppath>
97 <heading>MIME support mechanism</heading>
99 If you need assistance implementing this sub-policy, please
100 please ask for it on the debian-devel mailing list. If you
101 have proposals for changes or additions to this sub-policy,
102 please bring it up on debian-policy.
105 <heading>Background</heading>
107 MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, RFC 1521) is
108 a mechanism for encoding files and datastreams and providing
109 meta-information about them, in particular their type (e.g. audio
110 or video) and format (e.g. PNG, HTML, MP3).
114 Registration of MIME type handlers allows programs like mail
115 user agents and web browsers to to invoke these handlers to
116 view, edit or display MIME types they don't support directly.
122 <heading>MIME support implementation</heading>
124 The <package>mime-support</package> package provides the
125 <prgn>update-mime</prgn> program which allows packages to
126 register programs that can show, compose, edit or print
131 Packages containing such programs must register them
132 with <prgn>update-mime</prgn> as documented in <manref
133 name="update-mime" section="8">. They should <em>not</em> depend
134 on, recommend, or suggest <prgn>mime-support</prgn>. Instead,
135 they should just put something like the following in the
136 postinst and postrm scripts:
139 if [ -x /usr/sbin/update-mime ]; then