Five years ago, I measured what the most supported MIME type in Debian was, by analysing the desktop files in all packages in the archive. Since then, the DEP-11 AppStream system has been put into production, making the task a lot easier. This made me want to repeat the measurement, to see how much things changed. Here are the new numbers, for unstable only this time:
Debian Unstable:
count MIME type
----- -----------------------
56 image/jpeg
55 image/png
49 image/tiff
48 image/gif
39 image/bmp
38 text/plain
37 audio/mpeg
34 application/ogg
33 audio/x-flac
32 audio/x-mp3
30 audio/x-wav
30 audio/x-vorbis+ogg
29 image/x-portable-pixmap
27 inode/directory
27 image/x-portable-bitmap
27 audio/x-mpeg
26 application/x-ogg
25 audio/x-mpegurl
25 audio/ogg
24 text/html
The list was created like this using a sid chroot: "cat /var/lib/apt/lists/*sid*_dep11_Components-amd64.yml.gz| zcat | awk '/^ - \S+\/\S+$/ {print $2 }' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -20"
It is interesting to see how image formats have passed text/plain as the most announced supported MIME type. These days, thanks to the AppStream system, if you run into a file format you do not know, and want to figure out which packages support the format, you can find the MIME type of the file using "file --mime <filename>", and then look up all packages announcing support for this format in their AppStream metadata (XML or .desktop file) using "appstreamcli what-provides mimetype <mime-type>. For example if you, like me, want to know which packages support inode/directory, you can get a list like this:
% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype inode/directory | grep Package: | sort Package: anjuta Package: audacious Package: baobab Package: cervisia Package: chirp Package: dolphin Package: doublecmd-common Package: easytag Package: enlightenment Package: ephoto Package: filelight Package: gwenview Package: k4dirstat Package: kaffeine Package: kdesvn Package: kid3 Package: kid3-qt Package: nautilus Package: nemo Package: pcmanfm Package: pcmanfm-qt Package: qweborf Package: ranger Package: sirikali Package: spacefm Package: spacefm Package: vifm %
Using the same method, I can quickly discover that the Sketchup file format is not yet supported by any package in Debian:
% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/vnd.sketchup.skp Could not find component providing 'mimetype::application/vnd.sketchup.skp'. %
Yesterday I used it to figure out which packages support the STL 3D format:
% appstreamcli what-provides mimetype application/sla|grep Package Package: cura Package: meshlab Package: printrun %
PS: A new version of Cura was uploaded to Debian yesterday.
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