Embedded data for shared-mime

This package combines shared-mime with an embedded copy of the FreeDesktop.org Shared Mime Info database, to allow programs to use the MIME data (e.g. to detect file types) without requiring installation of the MIME database. It is intended to support scenarios like single-file binary deployment.

I strongly recommend that you gate use of this package behind a feature (possibly enabled by default), using the shared-mime package directly if that feature is disabled, to make it easier for packagers to distribute a version of your program that only uses the locally-installed shared MIME info (e.g. a Debian package of a program using shared-mime should depend on shared-mime-info and consult those files, not use an embedded copy).

[!IMPORTANT] This package, and the shared MIME data it imports, are GPL-licensed (v2+). Binaries using it must be GPL-licensed (even if their source code is under a different, GPL-compatible license such as MIT).

Implementation Notes

This package implements its copy by parsing the shared MIME info at build time, and serializing the parsed MIME entries with Postcard into a byte array embedded in resulting binaries. The binary version of version 2.4 of the FreeDesktop shared mime info is about 65KiB.