nginx-devel Digest, Vol 95, Issue 6

[Michiel Leenaars]

Dear Maxim,

MD> Please also take a look at 
MD> http://nginx.org/en/docs/contributing_changes.html, there should 
MD> be a single-line summary as the first line of the commit log.

will do, apologies.

MD> No, thanks.
MD> We generally do not try to include into conf/mime.types all the 
MD> MIME types in the world, but rather only most popular types 
MD> commonly used on websites.  In particular, this
MD> - prevents serving incorrect MIME type for files accidentally 
MD>   having the same extension as one of the types listed;
MD> - saves some CPU cycles.

NDRO> If you think that some of these types are popular enough and 
NDRO> deserve adding nevertheless, please resend the patch reduced to 
NDRO> only these types (and, ideally, providing some motivation).

well, ODF is the official document file format used by a number of
governments, NATO, as well as by hundreds of millions of users. It is
an international 'de jure' standard, including the file extensions and
associated mimetypes, which is the default file format of Apache Open
Office, LibreOffice, Calligra, NeoOffice (open source office
applications), as well as Collabio, Lotus Symphony and (at least in
Europe) of Microsoft Office - you can choose between the OOXML formats
and ODF upon install. Since the other file formats (including legacy
file formats) from that latter office productivity suite are included,
and ODF is mature and has been around for over 13 years if I'm correct,
I would argue that indeed these are among the most widely spread file
formats and that people would blindly expect them to be included by now
in all webserver. In fact I did, one of the websites I'm running was
unable to correctly serve presentations.

Apache has all of these exact same mimetypes in their mimetype catalog,
as does Lighttpd, and AFAIK have had them for many years (well before
OpenOffice became an Apache project):

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/httpd/httpd/trunk/docs/conf/mime.types
http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/1/wiki/mimetype_assigndetails

Both also serves up the legacy OpenOffice.org/StarOffice file formats
(that predate the ISO/IEC standard), as do applications like Mutt. I
have not hear anyone every have any problems with misclassification or
collisions, probably because it has been around for so long that
everybody knows to avoid those extensions - and would have found out
after downloading the first such document from most webservers or
opening an attachment.

However, I will follow your recommendation and submit two patches - one
for the current standard, and one for the legacy file formats. I would
argue that the first one is a no-brainer, and the second one is a
service to those organisations around the world that together still
have many archives online containing StarOffice/OpenOffice.org files.

Kind regards,
Michiel Leenaars