Files in the archive with no extension cause problems

["James A. Treacy" <treacy@debian.org>]

There are files which boot floppies controls that have no file
extension. This causes problems because apache assumes that they have
mime type text/plain and newbies don't can't figure out how to download
the file. A good example is dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/linux .
Try wget -S http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/disks-i386/current/linux

Here are some alternatives:
 - add .htaccess files and add lines like:
       <Files linux>
         ForceType application/octet-stream
       </Files>
   The problem with this is that not all mirrors are running apache.
   Additionally, if a site has set 'AllowOverride None', apache will give
   an error message when users try to download the file.
 - Have sites add 'DefaultType application/octet-stream' to either the
   apache config file or to a .htaccess file. Using a .htaccess file has
   the same problem as the first example. Besides the problem of getting
   hundreds of mirrors to modify their apache config, there is the
   additional problem that there are probably files in the archive that
   are plain text that would then be consider as binaries.
 - rename all binaries with no file extension

What I suggest is that starting with the next release any files that
aren't plain text be given an extension that will convince apache that
they are binaries. The biggest hassle here will be changing all the
links to the files.

If you don't do anything about this, the webmasters will be forced to
send all mail from lusers complaining about this problem to this list. :)

Not subscribed to this list so blah blah blah mail to me blah blah blah.

-- 
James (Jay) Treacy
treacy@debian.org