Re: redirect.pl sez Content-Type: application/x-perl

[Josip Rodin <joy@gkvk.hr>]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2002 at 10:10:52AM +0800, Andrew Shugg wrote:
> > Yeah, but the CGI(3pm) manual page says that that shouldn't be done:
> > 
> >        The redirect() function redirects the browser to a
> >        different URL.  If you use redirection like this, you
> >        should not print out a header as well.
> 
> If you don't use CGI.pm's redirect() then the script just needs to spit
> out the following:
> 
> 	"Content-Type: text/html\nLocation: $url\n\n"
> 
> I haven't looked at (don't have access to) the source of the Perl script
> in question, so just gave as many suggestions as I could think of.  =)

Here's the script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT

# Copyright 1999,2000 James Treacy.
# Permission is granted to use this under the GNU GPL.

# used to select a mirror from the pulldown menu on the www.d.o front page

require 5.001;
use strict;
use CGI;

MAIN:
{
  my ($input,   # The CGI data
      $site);

  $ENV{PATH} = "/bin:/usr/bin";
  # Read in all the variables set by the form
  $input = new CGI;

  # If you want, just print out a list of all of the variables.
  # print $input->dump;
  # exit;

  # print $input->header('text/html'); -- not allowed according to CGI(3pm)
  $site = $input->param('site');
  if ($input->param('page')) {
    if ($site =~ /^\w\w$/) {
      print $input->redirect("http://www.".$site.".debian.org".$input->param('page'))
    } else {
      print $input->redirect($site.$input->param('page'))
    }
  } else {
    print $input->redirect($site);
  }
}

(Hmm, have to update that copyright... and remove arcane variations...
and scrap it, anyway :)

> > I think I'll experiment with Apache's rewrite rules instead, that seems
> > much, much cleaner.
> 
> Won't that require replication of the rules at each Debian web mirror?

No, why? All of the mirrors use cgi.debian.org right now for the
redirections.

> (I'm not exactly sure how you're intending to implement this.)

Along these lines:

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/redirect.pl\?page=(.+)&site=(..)$ http://www.$1.debian.org$2 [L,R]

That way we spare the server of forking Perl just to do a redirection,
something that Apache does very well itself already...

What _really_ is the problem here is that I have to handle various
permutations of the URL syntax in the rewrite rule (e.g. ?site=xy&page=/ vs.
?page=/&site=xy etc).I'm likely going to fix this by having the web pages
use a different, more easily parsed syntax. :)

The regex matching in case someone puts crap inside it is also
troublesome... but the example above didn't work anyhow.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.