Syncing up the MIME databases

[Thomas Leonard]

On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 04:18:37PM -0500, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> I just went through the GNOME MIME database resyncing it to the
> freedesktop.org list.  I found the following MIME-types in GNOME and not
> in the freedesktop one.  I'd like to move them into freedesktop.org.xml.
> 
> application/vnd.corel-draw
> application/xbel
> application/x-bittorrent
> application/x-blender
> application/x-executable-binary
> application/x-font-otf
> application/x-font-type1
> application/x-ipod-firmware
> application/x-macbinary
> application/x-mozilla-bookmarks
> application/x-ms-dos-executable
> application/x-netscape-bookmarks
> audio/x-vorbis
> audio/x-speex
> audio/x-flac
> audio/x-ms-asx
> image/x-dcm
> image/x-dib
> image/x-dpx
> image/x-fits
> image/x-fpx
> image/x-icb
> image/x-sun-raster
> video/x-nsv
> video/theora
> 
> How is this file generated?

Originally by a script, but it should be done by hand now since there have
been changes made to it since then.

> Additionally, we have the following GNOME specific MIME types.  I am
> happy distributing them with GNOME, but I thought I'd look into putting
> them in the main distribution.

Shouldn't be a problem. The core database should contain as many types as
possible.

> There were a few MIME-types that caught my eye as being potentially
> problematic.  First, the inode/* MIME-types need to be 'x-' escaped, if
> nothing else.  I can't find anything at the IANA that indicates the
> presence of a inode/ content type.

There are lots of should-be-x-escaped ones. The policy was not to change
anything if lots of people were using them already. For the inode/* stuff
we should be OK. I think it unlikely that IANA will create an 'inode'
group, but even if they do, we'd be exceptionally unlucky if they then
created a subtype 'directory' with a different meaning ;-)

> Additionally, there is a text/x-csh, but .csh files will be caught by
> application/x-shellscript.  Same with zsh scripts.

Please go ahead and remove them.

> I'm also a bit concerned that we have MIME-types that aren't 'x-'
> encoded correctly.  Would it be worthwhile cross checking the current
> list with the IANA listing looking for invalid MIME types.  Similarly,
> would it be interesting to seed the current list with the IANA listing?

I thought we already did that. There was lots of checking with it anyway,
but we let a lot of well-estabilished types through.

The general agreement, as I recall, was that we should be using vendor
tags for new types (not x- prefixes), and keep the ones we were already
using the same.


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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