Today I Learned: A repository of short lessons
Mimemagic uses Mimetype information from freedesktop.org to drive its decisions. In versions 0.3.6 and lower (As well as 0.4.0) this file was included as part of the gem itself. However, on 24th March 2021 freedesktop.org notified the maintainer of mimemagic that it was in violation of the GPL.
https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/issues/97
All existing gem versions (0.3.5 and below) were immediately yanked, and new versions were released with GPL licences (0.3.6 and 0.4.0). However as this change of license has serious repercussions for downstream projects, work immediately begun to restore an MIT license.
Versions 0.3.7 and 0.4.1 were released on 25th March 2021, restoring the
MIT license. GPL licensed versions were yanked. In order to be compliant
with the GPL licensing terms mimemagic no longer includes freedesktop.org.xml
within the gem itself, and the file must be obtained manually.
The gem checks for the presence of this file on install, and thus will fail to install if a copy is not available.
Edit: Rails have updated marcel to remove the dependency on Mimemagic. For apps on Rails 5.2, 6.0 and 6.1 it is probably easiest to just update the rails components. (Assuming this is the only gem with a mime-magic dependency)
If you are attempting to install a project which has not yet updated mimemagic you will see an error similar to the following:
Your bundle is locked to mimemagic (0.3.6), but that version could not be found
in any of the sources listed in your Gemfile. If you haven't changed sources,
that means the author of mimemagic (0.3.6) has removed it. You'll need to update
your bundle to a version other than mimemagic (0.3.6) that hasn't been removed
in order to install.
This indicates that the project is still using the old version of mimemagic, which is no longer available. You will need to install a newer version, and update the Gemfile.lock.
bundle update mimemagic
However, before you do this, check the section below, as you may need to perform another couple of steps.
Upon attempting to install mimemagic (>0.3.7, >0.4.1) you may receive the following error:
Installing mimemagic 0.3.9 with native extensions
Gem::Ext::BuildError: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
current directory:
/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/mimemagic-0.3.9/ext/mimemagic
/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/bin/ruby
-I/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/lib/ruby/2.7.0/rubygems -rrubygems
/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/gems/rake-13.0.3/exe/rake
RUBYARCHDIR\=/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/extensions/x86_64-darwin-19/2.7.0/mimemagic-0.3.9
RUBYLIBDIR\=/Users/<username>/.rbenv/versions/2.7.2/lib/ruby/gems/2.7.0/extensions/x86_64-darwin-19/2.7.0/mimemagic-0.3.9
rake aborted!
Could not find MIME type database in the following locations:
["/usr/local/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml",
"/opt/homebrew/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml",
"/usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml"]
Ensure you have either installed the shared-mime-info package for your
distribution, or
obtain a version of freedesktop.org.xml and set FREEDESKTOP_MIME_TYPES_PATH to
the location
of that file.
This indicates that mimemagic is unable to find a copy of freedesktop.org.xml.
The suggested way of installing the dependencies is via brew:
brew install shared-mime-info
However, if your homebrew installation is not at the default location, this may be insufficient to fully solve the problem.
$ brew --prefix shared-mime-info
/Users/<username>/homebrew/opt/shared-mime-info
This indicates that the package is not installed at the default location of
/opt/homebrew/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml so you will need to tell
mimemagic where to find the file. If the above command returns
/opt/homebrew/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml you should be good to
go.
In order to fix the issue, you will need to set the environmental variable
FREEDESKTOP_MIME_TYPES_PATH to point to the freedesktop.org.xm file. You can
do this via:
export FREEDESKTOP_MIME_TYPES_PATH="`brew --prefix shared-mime-info`/share/shared-mime-info/packages/freedesktop.org.xml"
I recommend adding the above to your .bashrc or .zshrc to ensure its always
available. Note that you can also replace brew --prefix shared-mime-info with
the result of the command if you find its acting too slowly.
See the mimemagic repo for more information.