Re: Strange interaction between UM Gopher and Gophernicus
Hi David,
Thanks for the message (and also the one you sent to me privately).
I've enabled the issues tracker for UMN gopher.
In looking into this, when downloading a file locally, UMN gopher
suggests as the name -- you can always edit it -- the name, NOT the
selector path. In this case, Gophernicus is sending a very long name,
including spaces and the date, in the Gopher directory. UMN gopher is
simply taking it as the download suggestion.
In the wild, I guess I rarely see things like tar.gz files have a
different gopher name from the selector path.
Is this a bug in UMN gopher? To be honest, I'm not really sure. It is
certainly a Web convention to name downloaded files based on URL rather
than hyperlink, but I can really see pros and cons either way in the
Gopher context. I'm presently working on porting Pygopherd to Python 3,
so probably won't be working to develop a patch to UMN gopher on this
myself right now - though if others want to submit one, given my lack of
strong feelings one way or other, I'd be open to applying such.
Hope that helps,
John
On Wed, Nov 20 2019, David Griffith wrote:
> I noticed this odd interaction between the UM Gopher client and the
> Gophernicus server that I initially thought was a bug in Gophernicus.
> I reported it at https://github.com/gophernicus/gophernicus/issues/48
> whereupon it seems to have been traced to a problem in UM Gopher. To
> make things worse, it manifests only with this client/server
> combination.
>
> The basic problem is that with some file downloads, UM Gopher appends
> a bunch of dashes and the file's datestamp appended to the end of the
> filename. Contrary to what Fosslinux states, the bug isn't
> necessarily triggered by a long path. After playing with debugging
> fprintf()s, I found that at gopher.661.org, in the "Computer
> Underground Digest" directory, all of the textfiles there will show
> this problem. The path there is simply cud/ with the text files
> conforming to 8.3 filename length limits.
>
> I'd have filed an issue at https://github.com/jgoerzen/gopher, but the
> issues button is disabled.
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