On Wed, 7 Apr 1999, Simon Richter wrote: > Package: dpkg > Version: 1.4.0.34 > Severity: wishlist > > I'd like to propose a new dependancy type which could possibly be described > best with the keyword "affects". The problem behind this is that with slink, > many packages that register new mimetypes do not depend on mime-support, > and thus get configured before mime-support. Since the /etc/mailcap file is > not present at configuration time, they assume that mime-support is not > installed, and skip this step. Thus, about 50% of the available mimetypes > are not registered.
I think this particular problem would be solved by: 1. Making /etc/mailcap not to be a conffile but instead generate a default one in the postinst when it does not exist. 2. Making the generation of the default /etc/mailcap by mime-support.postinst to be done by a new script, mime-support-conf. 3. Making the install-mime script to call mime-support-conf to create a default /etc/mailcap if it does not exist, before registering any app. This way install-mime would not have to be configured first. I suggest that this bug is reassigned to mime-support as a technical suboptimality in the current implementation, because it may be solved without the need of a new dpkg field. Thanks.
