Re: Strange interaction between UM Gopher and Gophernicus
My reply is at the bottom. Please put your reply there too.
On Fri, 22 Nov 2019, Kim Holviala wrote:
On 22. Nov 2019, at 1.37, David Griffith <dave@661.org> wrote:
I think I found a smoking gun. When Gophernicus serves up a directory
containing a gophermap file, the selector is separated from the rest of
the line by tab characters.
Original author of Gophernicus here. You are all arguing about the wrong
thing here: the "problem" is that gopher the protocol has no concept of
filename so clients just have to guess one when saving files to disk.
This mirrors the problems in HTTP and MIME emails - originally they also
didn't have a concept of filenames so saving a file was always a hit or
miss (and it still is, kinda, because not all URLs or email attachments
come with a filename).
Yes, Gophernicus interprets the gopher RFC "slightly" broadly and uses
the name field to give additional information to human users, downside
being that computer users might get confused. But it's not against the
RFC, just a different interpretation of it.
Where should we go from here? I've been trying to find an example of a
gopher server that provides dates and filesizes in menus as a guide, but
haven't found one yet. After I discovered this "smoking gun", I thought
that adding a tab after the filename would work. I'm looking at menu.c
from lines 656 to the end. Line 666 is the printf() that produces a line
containing date and filesize.
printf("%c%s%s %s %s\t%s%s\t%s\t%i" CRLF, type,
If I change that line to this:
printf("%c%s\t%s %s %s\t%s%s\t%s\t%i" CRLF, type,
^^
This results in UM Gopher omitting the date and size. Floodgap's proxy
won't render anything. Clearly then, UM Gopher is the one with the
problem -- other clients don't act like this. So now I have three
questions:
1. What are the other clients doing to determine the end of the filename?
2. Did any other servers provide date and filesize?
3. Where can I find source code to historical gopher servers that were in
service in the early 1990s?
--
David Griffith
dave@661.org
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
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